Email marketing is a great way to reach out to your audience. Instead of bombarding them with advertisements and messages from other businesses and products, it’s much better to keep the content that you post and email send out as helpful and relevant as possible.
By sending your customers value-added information, you will be positioning yourself as a top-notch brand that
deserves more attention than the average business does.
In 1978, Gary Thuerk sent out an email about his new company marketing a product in hopes of generating sales.
The letter generated $13 million in sales ,making it one of the first known uses of email as a marketing channel.
Over the years, many people have considered email and its potential to be lackluster in comparison to more contemporary channels such as messaging or news feeds.
Despite this common criticism, however, there are countless examples to be found where companies started with email lists and eventually grew into multi-billion dollar companies due to what can be considered immediate success stemming from someone having opted-in to their initial email list.
Why to Use Email Marketing?
Now let’s understand why you should use email marketing and some benefits that support the reason why email marketing is so valuable.
Build relationships: Email marketing is an effective way to build, engage, and promote your business all at the same time.
Promote your content: As a marketing strategy, it has helped many businesses increase sales and grow their customer base due to its ability to help get tailored messages across in a personalized manner.
Boost brand awareness: If you’re not yet using email marketing as part of your overall digital marketing plan, now is the time to start learning how to reach new prospects who are interested in learning more about your product or service offerings.
Generate Leads: Entice your subscribers to provide their personal information in exchange for an asset that they’d find valuable. This could be a free ebook, lead magnet, membership site or even software.
Nurture Leads: If they are finding the content you’ve shared significant enough to give you their contact information, you’ll have their email address and can now continue a relationship with them. Also, LinkedIn allows you to import contacts so you can grow your list of potential customers without any additional action required on your part.
Benefits of Email Marketing
- There are over 4 billion email users worldwide. Email is the perfect place to find your customers, and they’ll be able to reach you too.
- According to a recent business analysis, it was indicated that by 2022, email marketing brings revenue of $38.85 for every dollar spent on this channel.
- That makes sense as 79% of marketers around the globe rank email marketing as their most effective marketing channel.
- There are many ways of reaching out to your customers and the best is just to use email. The great thing about email marketing is that you have full control over it. You don’t need to comply with anyone else or get approvals from anyone outside of compliance regulations because you own the channel, if you really want, though we don’t recommend doing this for every small thing as you could risk getting on potential customers’ blacklists and losing an entire collection of potential buyers.
Email Marketing Stats by Industry
Email marketing has its own set of rules that vary depending on your industry and who you’re targeting for your campaign. Below are some tips, tricks and lessons learned based on the experience of marketers in B2B, B2C, ecommerce and real estate.
Email Marketing Stats for B2B
31% of online marketers use online newsletters to nurture leads. Is your business using email as a way to distribute content? Online marketers believe that email engagement is the fourth most important metric when evaluating the success of their performance, more than social media, search rankings, and lead quality.
Email Marketing Stats for B2C
Roughly 60% of consumer-driven companies consider doing something about improving their email marketing strategy. Roughly 36.4% of companies in the consumer goods and services sectors send marketing emails on a daily basis.
Getting Started
Before you get overwhelmed with the vast possibilities of email marketing, let’s break down a few key tips to get you started building a successful campaign. These are the steps you need to follow so that your customers will keep coming back for more.
Create a Strategy
When building an email strategy, plan ahead by choosing a few key steps that address your objectives and the type of message you want to send. Think of these five steps now as a simple foundation of ideas for setting up your email marketing campaign.
- Understand your Audience: An effective email is relevant and tailored. Just like the marketing campaign that goes with it, it all starts with your buyer persona. Understand what they want and tailor your email campaign to their needs.
- Set your goals: Before you set any email marketing goals, it’s a good idea to research those of your competitor. You will want to know what the average open rates are in your niche, plus other details such as the average number of links included and even where the marketing is coming from (such as social media and direct mail). This way you can use these benchmarks to establish milestones for your own campaign.
- Build your email list: You need some people to email don’t you? The best way to do this is to have someone’s attention. There are several different ways in which you can use it for getting a prospect’s attention and a few of them are free. Once you get their attention one has to take care of the lead before it dies because every single lead costs your business money which eventually burns out so that top priority must be resolved or else everything falls apart. Don’t worry if they start off with only a few people on your list. It takes time to build an effective email list but once your business starts growing you’ll see there comes a point when you’ll wish that you had started building an email list from day one.
- Choose your campaign type: Emailing your audience can prove to be quite the challenge because there are so many different types of campaigns. Do you send a weekly newsletter or integrated blog posts? Or should you send out new product announcements? There are endless possibilities and questions that plague marketers at all times, but to find an answer, first you’ll need to choose which type of email is going to be best for your particular preferences, audience and interests. If you have multiple interest groups and audiences (for example, one list with customers and another with prospects) then knowing how the lists interact with each other will help bring order within your mailing statistics.
- Set a schedule: Create a schedule in which you plan to communicate with your list. This will help your audience get accustomed to the frequency of your communications and help build your brand recognition because they already know what to expect from you. Consistency is key here, so make sure that once you create this schedule, your communication methods follow it without fail. By knowing how frequently to contact them, subscribers can decide whether or not they want it as part of their daily routine. If for some reason something comes up and you change it,
just be sure to let them know about it so that you don’t lose anyone along the way.
- Measure your results: This should come as no surprise: we measure everything. Being meticulous about every key metric will help you make small changes to your emails that will yield large results.
