Email marketing is one of the most effective tools you can use in your digital marketing strategy. One of its many perks is that it allows you to maintain contact with your audience and leads, provided that you have a quality database. What are the other perks? If you want to know them all, continue reading.
What is email marketing exactly?
Many people don’t understand clearly what exactly is email marketing. It’s not their fault, really: there are so many companies that send thousands of emails lacking value to people who didn’t even subscribe to these emails in the first place. This isn’t email marketing, it’s spam; however, it’s hard to tell the difference if you don’t know the definition of email marketing.
Email marketing is actually very simple: you send emails to your database. The objects of these emails could differ: the emails could sell a product or service, interact with a customer, or help increase the audience’s loyalty. However, such emails aren’t sent randomly and to random people. The companies using email marketing properly have their own database and use the information that customers and contacts provide willingly.
Therefore, we don’t recommend purchasing databases online: in this case, you’ll end up sending emails to people who didn’t subscribe to them and most likely won’t appreciate them. This is especially important because of the new Data Protection Law, which came into force last May 2018 and gives users greater control over their personal data.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Now that we know how exactly email marketing differs from spam, it’s time to focus on the benefits of email marketing.
It enables direct and personalized communication.
You can use emails to maintain constant personalized communication with your contacts, no matter how big or small your company is. There are plenty of platforms for email marketing automation, such as eSputnik: they help you make the whole marketing process as easy as it can be. Using such platforms allows you to personalize the emails by adding the names of the recipients and by offering these recipients content that is based on their preferences and needs.
Such segmentation helps marketing professionals ensure that their audience will receive emails that look like they’re addressed to them only. This could both booth sales and increase the audience’s trust.
2. It is easy to evaluate.
How do you find out whether your digital marketing strategy is effective or not? By tracking the effectiveness of all its tools, of course. Email marketing is no exception: it also has to be measured to help you understand which emails work and which don’t.
Different email marketing platforms provide metrics to track the impact of email campaigns. The open rate and the number of clicks on the links are the most important things to analyze; however, they aren’t the only ones you should track.
3. It drives more conversions.
Another benefit of email marketing is its ability to generate conversions. If your strategy is well-defined and offers something valuable and relevant to the audience, it’s likely to drive more conversions than the other marketing tools. For instance, statistics show that email marketing converts 3 times more than social media.
4. It helps you build customer loyalty and your brand image.
Building customer loyalty is often one of the main goals of email marketing campaigns. When you send an email to a customer who has already purchased your products or services, you remind them that your company is still there to meet their needs and to help them. It might seem obvious; however, it’s still important for any business.
The competition is always high on the market; therefore, it’s crucial for the companies to remind of their existence to the customers. Otherwise, there might be a chance that the customers will forget about you.
Such communication also helps companies to connect with their audience emotionally and to build trust. In this way you create a bond between you and your customers and encourage them to recommend your business to their family and friends.
5. It helps save funds.
Marketing campaigns are often pricey; however, not in the case of email marketing. It doesn’t require many costs to run a successful email marketing campaign. In fact, some of the most popular email marketing platforms have subscription plans that allow you to send a certain number of emails each month for free.
This is especially important for small businesses that cannot afford to invest a lot in a promotion. They can start with limited free subscription plans and then switch to premium monthly plans. Of course, it’s important to create a well-defined strategy and to build a database before doing so.
6. It can be automated.
The timing of emails often matters. At the same time, you don’t have to send each email manually, especially when the time isn’t convenient for you at all. Most email marketing services enable email marketing automation. You can test different time of the day, find out what works best for your customers, set up email campaigns and let the service of your choice do the rest.
7. It helps boost website traffic.
Last but not least, email marketing could help you to boost website traffic as well (assuming that you add links to your emails). Your goal here is to come up with amazing subject lines that would encourage subscribers to open the emails, to read them and to click on the links these emails contain, visiting your blog or website.
These are the main benefits of email marketing. If they seem appealing enough, don’t hesitate to try email marketing for your business. Just don’t forget that you have to come up with a clear strategy and goals to make it more successful.
What do you want to achieve with your campaigns? How are you going to do it? What content will you create to achieve that? Answering these questions will help you build a strong strategy to achieve your goals. Furthermore, choosing the right marketing automation software like eSputnik will help you achieve these goals quickly and effectively.