… so what do you need to be aware of to get the best from your Email communications?
Pros of Email marketing
Widely accessible
Email is used by over half of the world’s population, and that number is rising. Over 300 billion Emails were sent in 2020.
Measurable
You can measure the traffic your Emails send to your website in Google Analytics, but if you use Marketing Automations such as Mail Chimp or Hubspot, you can see open rates, click-through rates and unsubscribes. Importantly, you can trial subject lines, content and designs to determine what works best for you.
Cost effective
Not only because of the ROI, but also the time savings that Email automation gives you. This GetResponse survey shows 30% of professionals reporting time saving as the biggest benefit of automation.
Grows your sales
The more you grow, nurture and segment your customer database so that messages are nicely targeted and personalised, the better your performance will be. Create lead magnets to persuade customers to share their email address, and add them to a drip campaign to get the conversation going. Once they’ve bought from you, email is a great way to keep customers engaged with your brand and to build your average customer lifetime value.
Still need persuading? Optinmonster research that says 60% of users consider email as their preferred channel for promos, versus just 20% for social media.
Builds relationships
People check their emails on average 15 times a day, so a well timed message will get noticed – particularly since they’ve opted in to hear from you. As a result, a well targeted email is more likely to be read and responded to than a social media post or Ad. Whether you are using email for customer recruitment or retention, encourage your subscribers to share your content to increase it’s reach and grow your database of like-minded people.
Channel agnostic
If you run a multi-channel business, email is the perfect way to steer customers to their channel of choice. Also, email is mobile friendly – about 60% of email opens are made on a mobile device.
Cons of Email marketing
Spam
You cannot “spray and pray” when it comes to email – it isn’t just a numbers game.
Email marketing is all about the right message for the right audience. Poorly targeted messages lead to customers not clicking, deleting your messages, or worse, unsubscribing.
Sometimes the internet service providers filter out emails which are considered “spammy”, so avoid words like “free” or “click here” in your headlines.
Importantly, your messages also need to comply with local privacy and data protection laws.
File size
Many email servers have file size gateways, so you need to be careful about the video, image or attachment sizes for your email to avoid your message getting blocked. Even if your message does get through, if it’s slow to load, your customer is likely to give up and move on to the next message.
You have to nurture your database
You can’t just keep adding people to your database – every now and again, it will need a clean-up. People subscribe more than once, they change email address, their personal circumstances change. Time invested in keeping your data clean will give you the best results from your email campaigns.
Resources and skills
Successful email marketing requires segmentation, so your team need to be able to manage multiple messaging. When you think about Welcome campaigns, Newsletters, Invitations, Progress updates, Review requests or Abandon Basket messages as examples of emails, you can see the complexity if not well managed.
Consider outsourcing copywriting, or list building if your in-house team doesn’t have the skills.
Tips for email success
- Address your customer by name – a simple, but personal touch
- Segment your list (e.g. Geography, Basic demographics, Purchase history)
- Send content which is valuable, useful and engaging for each of your user segments
- Automate your campaigns – there are a number of free tools available to get you going
- Enable tracking (so you can see traffic generated by your emails in your Google Analytics)
- Measure and respond to your KPIs – commonly used ones are open-rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate
Summary
If you find yourself going round in circles with email, it’s time to get some help. Your trusted Digital Marketing Advisors can help you select the right tool, get you trained and up and running, help you with copy, or even run campaigns for you. If this sounds like you, don’t hesitate to contact us for a chat.
