How Effective is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is an important digital marketing technique. However, it is often overlooked by companies who believe that its effectiveness rate is not high enough to allocate significant company resources towards it.

For most companies, investing in email marketing is actually a very wise decision. This is because email marketing tends to generate very high ROI. In fact, on average, email marketing efforts generate $32 for every $1 spent. This makes email marketing an extremely effective way to spend marketing dollars.

Not only do marketing emails generate substantial return on investment, but they are still the preferred method of primary customer acquisition for roughly 81 percent of all small-to-midsized businesses. They are also a preferred marketing channel for customer retention.

Why is Email Marketing so Effective?

Email marketing is extremely effective for a number of reasons. For starters, it enables companies to reach people who have already visited their site and therefore demonstrated an interest in the company’s products. Many companies capture visitor emails with drop-down screens that ask visitors to enter their emails to receive updates.

Through email marketing, companies can also target people who added items to their cart, but never checked out. These type of people are the ideal demographic to target with marketing emails because they were already very close to making a purchase. With an abandoned cart email, you can send your customer an email showing them the exact item they had in their cart and ask them if they still want to purchase it. Abandoned cart email conversion rates are around 3 percent.

Another reason why email marketing is still so effective is that it helps you to reach mobile customers. Most mobile users have email apps right on their phones which they check regularly. So, if you send your customers emails, it’s like you can access them any time of day, considering many people carry their cell phones on them almost wherever they go.

One more reason why email marketing is so effective is that it is extremely cheap compared to other forms of marketing. You can pay a freelance writer $50 to write a 500-word email, and then send that email to thousands of customers. The money that that one email could generate is astronomical.

Coupons and Deals

One of the main reason why people will give you their email address on your website is that they want to stay informed about any coupons or deals that you might offer. This is because people love to save money. So, the opportunity that they gain to potentially save money is often worth them giving you their email address. In fact, roughly 27 percent of US online shoppers subscribe to store or product emails in order to save money.

Another interesting statistic regarding online coupons and deals is that 64 percent of internet users have printed a coupon from an email. People simply love deals and coupons. So, if you have never tried to run a deal or a coupon through your email marketing efforts, then you should definitely try it out and see how it goes. You might be surprised at the results.

Creating Your Email Marketing Strategy

The first thing that you should know about your email marketing strategy is that it should not be the only digital marketing effort you should make. Paid search, organic search, social media posts, and blogs can all also be extremely effective.

The second thing that you need to know about creating an effective email marketing strategy is that you do not have to send all of your emails individually to your clients or to CC them in one big group. You can instead, use services such as Mailchimp and Aweber to automatically collect emails from your clients and create one giant list. Then, every email you send can automatically go out to all of your clients. This is an extremely efficient way to communicate with your audience.

When you write your emails, it is also important to have an interesting headline and a from an address that is associated with your business name. Otherwise, your customers will think it is spam. So, don’t send marketing emails from your personal email address.

You should also personalize the emails. So, your emails should include the recipient’s first name in the intro. Aweber and Mailchimp have options that let you automatically insert their first names into the intro. So, you should use these.

The next thing you need to do is keep them short and sweet and quickly get to the call to action. This is because people have very short attention spans and you do not want to bore them. They want to know what the information is saying and what they need to do next. They don’t want to be reading a novel when they open their email. In fact, the average person will only spend 11.1 seconds reading an email.

Once you have done all of these things, then you are ready to send your email campaign out. On MailChimp and Aweber, you can choose when you would like the emails to go out. For example, three days after they visit your website, four, etc. You can have email sequences that are three emails long, five emails long, etc.

You should send out your campaign and then analyze the results. The results will provide you with critical information that you can implement in your next email series, such as which type of subject lines work best, which deals are converting the best, etc. Do not underestimate the value of this data.

Conclusion

Email marketing is still an incredibly important marketing channel and should be used by nearly any company that has an online presence. Email marketing is not only a highly effective way to engage with customers, but it is also very cheap compared to other options like paid search, newspaper ads, television ads, etc.

If your company has not been taking email marketing very seriously, then it should. It is one of the most important areas where you should be spending your marketing dollars.

Need help creating the perfect email marketing campaign? Let us do the hard work so you can focus on the core elements of your business. Contact us today to get started.