With all the ways to interact with your customers, whether through social media, face-to-face, or other channels, it is easy to overlook email marketing. If your business is not actively building a database of customer emails, you may be setting your business up for digital failure. But what exactly is email marketing?
What is Email Marketing?
Before we get into why email marketing is important for your business, let’s understand exactly what is email marketing. Email marketing is a way to reach your customers or prospective customers through email who have given your business explicit permission to contact them.
You need to use email marketing responsibly since it is such a powerful channel. Let’s take a look at why it is so important for your business.
Targeted Marketing Opportunities
Unlike many other marketing opportunities, when properly implemented, email marketing can provide your business with various ways to target specific customers. To do this, make sure that your email marketing software allows for lead scoring. This will allow you to define various milestones or actions that a user exhibits through interactions within emails or your website. Once a user has met the criteria you have defined, you can then follow up with them with targeted messaging to further drive them down the funnel.
More Personal and Targeted than Social Media
While there are many benefits of using social media for your business, there are many of your customers who might not use social media. However, these people more than likely have an email address.
There are numerous ways to capture a customer’s email address. A few ways are having a form on your website, asking them during the account creation or checkout process, or even asking them during a phone call. Pair their email address up with a first and last name and you have the foundation set for sending personalized emails, meaning you could dynamically insert their information within emails or subject lines.
Data Driven & Measurable
Knowing what works and what doesn’t is key to the success and improvement of a marketing campaign. With email marketing, you get insights into your initiatives.
Insight into a metric like open rates which is what percent of users who were sent an email actually opened the email you sent. One key factor in improving open rates is having an intriguing subject line. Whether it is having personalization in the subject line, or text that makes it impossible for them not to open, having an eye catching subject line helps to create higher open rates.
Stay Top of Mind
Email marketing allows your business to email the consumer whenever you want. While not every email needs to be a sales pitch, your contact with the customer should provide something of value to them. Whether this is a link to your latest blog post, an email asking them questions relating to your industry, or even an update on new products coming out in the near future; using email to stay connected to your customers keeps your brand in the forefront of their minds.
Generate Sales
At the end of the day, your business is about making sales. You have probably heard the phrase, “the money is in the list.” The list they are referring to is your email list.
Email marketing can be a channel to help you increase sales when implemented properly. I am not talking about blasting your list with sales pitch after sales pitch. That won’t work out too well. Your business needs to use email marketing the right way. The smart way. To do this, I suggest pairing up your email marketing with a marketing automation platform, allowing you to put your email marketing initiatives on overdrive.
Cost Effective & Affordable
You might be thinking that email marketing sounds great and all, but with all these features, it is surely an expensive strategy? Sure there will be some initial up front setup and implementation costs, but once once the foundation is set, the ongoing maintenance cost is minimal compared to the return.
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