25 Nov Email Marketing Is Still Alive

Think email marketing is dead? Not so fast! Email marketing is still alive and kicking — and it’s something your business can’t afford to miss out on implementing. Email campaigns allow your business to directly deliver relevant content, product features, sales and more to your customers’ inboxes. With the right email marketing strategy, your business can develop strong relationships with your customers throughout their buyer’s journey, leading to an increase in web traffic, quality leads, boosted sales and stronger customer loyalty.

Did you know that it’s estimated around 293 billion emails were sent and received globally in 2019, according to Statista? These numbers are only expected to increase by the tens of billions in the coming years. Email is certainly increasing in use, but that can often make it difficult to make sure your campaigns are actually received and viewed by your customers.

To get the most out of your email marketing campaigns, you need to have an email marketing strategy in place. Before we get down to strategy, however, let’s learn more about the benefits of email marketing and how to choose an email marketing platform!

Benefits of Email Marketing

Email marketing is similar to traditional direct mail marketing, where businesses send communications to customers featuring a variety of different campaigns such as product features/catalogues, coupons, newsletters and more. Rather than stuffing your physical mailbox with these print materials, most businesses have now gone digital and send much of this information digitally via email.

Just as direct mail campaigns were incredibly successful back in the day, the benefits of email marketing can bring equally successful results — if not even greater!

Not only does email marketing allow you to have a more direct connection with your customers, but its direct nature also beats social media, where users are inundated with quick-scrolling content. With email marketing, you can easily stand out and keep your customers focused on your content for a longer period of time. Through this, your customers can really get to know your brand values and how you value them as customers.

High ROI is also a major benefit of email marketing. For every $1 spent on an email marketing campaign, the average ROI is $38! Additionally, your business retains full control over your email marketing campaign and strategy, rather than completely relying on a third party. You retain control over who your marketing emails are delivered to and when. With this control, you can also directly track the effectiveness of your campaigns and how users interacted with your email content.

Finally, email marketing allows your business to send more personalized messages to customers through segmentation, which is when specific emails are sent to customers based on how they have interacted with your content, such as customers who abandoned their online shopping cart before making a purchase or customers who recently haven’t been opening your marketing emails for a long time. This personalization can also extend into sending segmented emails for the many stages of your identified buyer’s journey. This targeted strategy can lead to improved click-through-rates (CTRs) and conversions!

Social media and PPC ads can certainly help your business online, but it’s hard to compete with the direct nature and proven success of email marketing.

How to Choose an Email Marketing Platform

By now, it should be clear that your business needs to start using email marketing. Sending emails straight from your inbox risks getting marked as spam and becoming permanently blocked. So, how should you instead choose an email marketing platform to get started?

Here are three key attributes you should look for in an email marketing platform:

1. Software Integration — To better track the performance of your email marketing, you’ll need your email software of choice to offer seamless integration with your CRM, or customer relationship management software. (We discussed CRMs in last week’s blog post, “What Is a CRM?”!) A CRM can make your email marketing time-efficient by automatically updating email lists, easily managing customer data, and instantly providing reports on KPIs such as open rates and CTRs.
2. Responsive Design — The world is going mobile, especially for email. If your marketing emails don’t look right or can’t display content on mobile devices, you’re going to quickly lose email subscribers, possibly even some customers altogether. Bounce rates will also increase, and your business will miss out on any potential conversions and sales. Therefore, it’s important to make sure your selected email marketing platform offers responsive design and functionality.
3. Automated Response Options — While many of your marketing emails may not solicit a response from your customers, some might. Depending on the type of response and volume of responses, you might not have the time to manually respond to every single email while also trying to manage your business. The option for automated responses and aggregation of customer responses into support tickets through your email marketing platform can easily streamline your email processes, especially for larger email lists. 

 

Developing an Email Marketing Strategy

Now that you know why email marketing is important and some key features to look for in an email marketing platform, you can finally get started developing an email marketing strategy!

Create effective marketing emails with the following features:

• Personalization — Every customer is unique, and they each have a unique experience with your brand. Email marketing is a great opportunity to use that to your advantage by providing personalized emails for your customers based on their exhibited interests, product purchases, general location and more. Of course, you will need the help of a CRM or a customer data management (CDM) platform to help aggregate and implement this customized content. Personalizing your marketing emails makes sure that your customers are receiving content that they are more likely to engage with.
• Segment Your Audience — On a broader scale, you can use audience segmentation to send specific email campaigns to different categories of customers to increase engagement and conversion rates. For example, you can create targeted email campaigns for customers at each stage of the buyer’s journey with your business. Once again, a CRM can help with this segmentation. 
• Mobile Responsiveness — As previously mentioned, mobile-friendly emails ensure that your bounce rates stay low while your CTRs and conversion rates go up. Your email software should allow for campaigns that look great and work perfectly on both desktop and mobile devices. For mobile emails, keep your subject line, pre-header, and calls-to-action (CTAs) short, clear and impossible to miss.
• Split Testing — Split testing, also known as A/B testing, helps you refine your email marketing strategy by testing out different elements at a single time. You can easily test out different subject lines, personalization elements, sender names, design features, CTAs and more this way. Split testing works by splitting your email campaigns into two groups in order to compare engagement rates from each group. To ensure testing is effective, test out only one different feature at a time.
• Automated Sequencing — Creating automated sequences or workflows helps keep your customers connected with your business, and they can help you retain customers who might have otherwise been lost. Also known as trigger-based emails, these automated campaigns include emails such as welcome emails, transaction emails, thank you emails, abandoned cart reminders and more. These automated emails will need to be integrated into your website or e-commerce solution in order to perform.

 

UK Email Marketing Services

Are you looking for email marketing services for your UK business? Look no further than Virtual Stacks Systems UK! Our digital marketing experts can help you reach your customers with a targeted email marketing strategy. We’ll help set your marketing goals, identify your target audience, help you build your email list, design email templates, create engaging content that actually converts, and track your results. Contact us today to discuss your email marketing and other digital marketing needs!