Email marketing provides you with a great customizable approach to promoting and selling your products and services. This includes the use of different types of marketing strategies such as seasonal promotions, newsletters, and triggered campaigns that can be tailored to your brand’s vision.
While its main goal is to create awareness about the new things your business is cooking up, it can also be a way for you to educate your audience regarding your company and its value in the industry.
The personalized approach that you create can act as an essential piece of your marketing strategy. With the right email campaigns, you can drive prospects down a personalized sales funnel, leading to more conversions. As a result, this can also encourage repurchase and improve customer loyalty, increasing their customer lifetime value.
A Brief History of Email Marketing
The concept of emails and online communication has been around for generations, with the first electronic message sent in either, depending on who you ask. This serves as the starting point for the modern communication methods that you are familiar with today.
Sometime after this event, Ray Tomlinson continued to modify a network of machines that would be used to send messages from one address to another using the famous @ symbol. This was modified in such a way to help the network determine its destination more accurately. Compared to the modern-day connections you see today, this older system did not have the internet to rely on to get these messages across.
In terms of email marketing, the first known message was sent by a marketing manager from Digital Equipment Corp known as Gary Thuerk. During that time, the email reached over 400 recipients promoting his company’s products such as computers. Much to anyone’s surprise, the attempt was proven successful as the marketing tactic generated over $13 million in sales.
Despite not being the first email sent in history, Thuerk famously claimed the title “Father of Spam” after this event. At the same time, it also served as a crucial starting point in introducing email marketing strategies to several different types of industries in the future. Today, email marketing has grown exponentially and has continued to change conventional approaches to better fit the continuously changing needs of modern-day consumers.
Why is Email Marketing Important?
Email marketing serves as a powerful tool that you can use to greatly influence the way your consumers engage with your brand, products, and content. Despite not having the same maximum reach potential as social media platforms, email gives you the opportunity to create more genuine interactions with your targets.
Here are a few reasons that show the importance of this email marketing and how you can use it to build and scale your business over time.
- There are over 4 billion email users worldwide
As of 2021, there are now over 4.1 billion active online users in the world that regularly use email as a form of communication between different contacts. This suggests that more than half of the planet’s total population can be reached through a registered email address.
This statistic shows the potential impact that a simple email can make as it can effectively engage numerous prospects all over the world at the same time. Combined with other marketing strategies, it can be a more personal way to get your message across and appeal to your consumers.
- It is the most widely used feature on smartphones
Modern-day consumers are always on the go which means that they often rely on their phones to attain information quickly and conveniently.
91% of smartphone users open and check their emails on their smartphones. Mobile phones also inspire more responses from users because sending messages from a phone is easier, more convenient, and 54% faster than sending messages from a computer. It is also worth noting that B2C emails receive 57.4 percent more mobile opens than B2B emails and with this, it is best to create email marketing campaigns that are mobile-friendly. Through this, email campaigns continue to remain a relevant form of marketing tactic for not only marketers but consumers as well.
- Has the ability to influence purchasing decisions
Hubspot states that around 59% of consumers admit that promotional emails play a role in helping them decide whether or not they want to purchase a product or service. This is because customers that buy certain products marketed through these emails typically spend more than those who don’t get them.
Marketing emails not only give your customers regular updates on events and new products, but they can also help make finding a particular item or service easier and more convenient. Through this, you can increase the chances of repeat purchases as they continue to engage with your brand.
- Millennials surprisingly love it
The majority of today’s consumers are now mainly composed of the millennial and Gen Z generation who are born and raised in the modern digital age. As these consumers become heavily reliant on online platforms, reaching out to them where they feel most comfortable becomes a key strategy to building your email marketing strategy.
When communicating with particular brands and business platforms, 73% of millennials state that they prefer to be contacted through their email rather than other mediums such as social media. Among the choices of preferred email providers, Gmail ranks as the most popular option today across the two generations.
- Email is essential to business growth amongst B2B companies
Apart from consumer and retail brands, email marketing can also help B2B organizations grow and scale their business. Around 83% of established companies state that they make use of newsletters as their main content marketing driver to boost engagement and total audience reach.
Through email marketing efforts, your business gains the opportunity to create more genuine and personalized interactions with your target audience. This not only becomes an essential part of building an effective marketing strategy but also allows you to build stronger relationships with your customers who will be more likely to recommend your brand to others.
How can Email Marketing fuel your overall Strategy?
Regardless of what type of industry your business belongs to, maintaining relationships with your customers is an essential part of attaining success. However, just getting their attention alone is often not enough, which is why marketers spend a great deal of their time developing a variety of nurturing strategies.
Different methods of marketing can appeal to different types of consumers, but they can also be combined with one another to create unique experiences. Among these strategies include the use of email, which can improve your overall approach across the buyer’s journey.
- Generate awareness
The first step in any marketing tactic is to catch the attention of your target audience in such a way that creates interest and the urge to learn more about your brand. Unlike advertisements on social media platforms which users can just scroll past, emails allow you to take a personalized approach that can make you seem more empathetic to the needs of your target.
With the power of data, you can create a list of contacts that best fit the type of prospects you want to target. At the same time, you can also gain valuable insights into what these targets like and dislike to see, allowing you to optimize your strategies over time.
- Nurture prospects
Once you’ve caught the attention of your target customers, you now have the opportunity to convert them into paying customers. More often than not, these targets will want to feel that they are getting something valuable through their purchases. As a means of providing this security, you need to create a strong and effective email campaign that provides useful information related to their subjects of interest.
During this stage, it is important to engage with your target audience and cater to any inquiries that they may have. This will help guide them through the buyer’s journey and establish that your products and services are worth trusting and buying from.
- Convert new customers
Prospects will not always be ready to convert into paying customers immediately after receiving one of your marketing emails. Because of this, it is not uncommon to make use of exclusive deals, discounts, free trials, and strong calls to action to help sweeten the deal even further.
Other strategies can also be used such as improving the overall design of your email campaigns in such a way that addresses current marketing trends, email preferences, design choices, and more. Depending on the demographic you’re targeting, changes can also be made more frequently to cater to things like seasonal campaigns.
- Advocate through experiences
Once your customers have purchased your products and services, it is important to maintain your relationship with them and keep them engaged. This is because attaining new customers is often more difficult and costly compared to maintaining the community that you’ve already built.
Repeat customers can often drive sales by continuing to offer them other deals and related products that they may want to buy. At the same time, you can also ask them for feedback on their experience to show that you value their opinions and are continuously looking to improve your brand’s services.
Email Marketing Best Practices
The use of email marketing has expanded dramatically over the recent years as it continues to prove its effectiveness. Compared to other channels, email is considered the best option in promoting your brand’s goods and services to customers across all age groups. However, for a campaign to be successful, you need to establish good practices that deliver a strong and lasting impression to your audience each time.
- Establish a specific goal for your brand
Before you start working on anything, establishing a clear goal for your brand is an essential first step that you need to take. Doing so not only helps you map out your strategy more clearly, but you can also avoid wasting valuable time and resources along the way. Apart from that, it can also serve as something that pushes you to keep moving forward despite potential issues that arise.
- Keep an eye on your progress
Make use of available resources to help you keep track of your progress through each stage of your campaign. This can help you pinpoint specific issues in your tactics that may need immediate adjustments for your strategy to work. Additionally, you can also have a good idea of how well your brand is doing compared to when you started out.
- Avoid buying email lists
Building a genuine relationship with your audience takes time because you need to gain their trust. As tempting as simply buying a contact list is, doing so can harm your growth and the reputation of your brand. In these instances, your messages will most likely be filtered as spam which hinders your ability to attract new customers.
- Personalization
Personalized emails and eye-catching subject lines get read more. To increase your success rates, you can use tactics such as using the recipient’s name or a subject of interest that is relevant to them. This can make it seem that you are reaching out to them as a person rather than simply sending an automated message.
- Segmentation
Taking time to organize your contact list and categorize them based on their individual profiles can help you analyze consumer behavior more easily. At the same time, doing so helps you send relevant content to a specific target faster and more conveniently.
- Provide value
On average, a person spends 12 seconds reading an email before closing it. As a means of improving the initial impact of your campaign, it’s important to keep your content engaging and give recipients a reason to want more. Before you send out marketing emails, review them carefully to determine if they are impactful.
- Optimize for any screen size
These days, emails can easily be accessed through multiple different devices such as tablets, smartphones, smartwatches, etc. Because of this, it is important to consider how your messages will appear on these devices. When optimizing your emails, make use of responsive formatting and loadable media that best suit a variety of different screen sizes.
- Keep your content consistent
Being consistent with the content sent out can help your brand build the momentum it needs to leave a lasting impression. At the same time, recipients will continue to stay subscribed to your listing as you continue to provide relevant information that matches their subject of interest.
Email Marketing Tools and Templates
Depending on your needs, different tools can provide you with an array of features and versatility to help you get what you need to be done without skimping out on quality.
Here is a quick list of quality email tools that you can use to improve your brand’s operations.
Hemingway is a free and handy editing tool that automatically analyzes your grammar and readability score. Through the application, the program will show you possible word alternatives, sentence structures, and other grammatical issues that you can change to increase the quality of your work.
This is an all-around tool that both beginners and experienced marketers can use to create and organize email campaigns. GetResponse features simplified tools that allow you to build, customize, and test your emails quicker thanks to its versatile design. It also has an impressive feature that automatically organizes your contact list based on lead data.
Email Octopus has one of the cleanest dashboard designs so you can focus on building your campaigns. With this affordable email marketing tool, you can easily implement more advanced marketing tactics at any time using multiple features such as automation and segmentation.
Before you send out any emails to your contact list, it is always important to check if they will show up properly on different devices. Litmus helps you with just that and more. With this application, you can test out each version of your emails, gain detailed email analytics, and even make use of its spam detecting features.
Email Marketing Success Stories
While building a successful tactic is not always easy, many brands have already proven that a good campaign can go a long way. Take a look at a few of the companies that have found the perfect recipe for success from their email campaigns.
- PayPal
PayPal makes use of clever and relatable campaigns to catch the attention of their audience and reel them in. Since the brand deals with providing simple ways to make financial transactions online, their campaigns consist of simple scenarios that can be connected to their services. This shows that the brand is aware of how its services are being used which creates a positive impact on their company.
- Kate Spade
Kate Spade made use of an email campaign that encourages its customers to share their experiences while enticing them with rewards. With this strategy, marketers were able to benefit from the collected data which would be used to help improve plans made for new campaigns. At the same time, customers were able to claim a gift of 25% off on purchases. That’s a win-win for everyone!
- Uber
Messages from Uber are always clear and concise, which reflects the way that their services work. The brand is known to consistently alert its customers on new offers such as discounts, promotions, and guides that help improve the overall customer experience. At the same time, their visual branding also serves to highlight their messages which further strengthens the impact of call-to-actions.
Email Marketing Trends in 2022
- User-generated content
User-generated content gives you the chance to integrate different perspectives into your campaigns to keep your content fresh and relevant. At the same time, you also bring what is most interesting to specific contacts which can ultimately boost satisfaction levels towards your brand.
- Augmented and Virtual Reality (AR & VR)
AR and VR are currently two of the most popular emerging technologies that you can utilize in 2022. Not only do they have a wide range of applications, but they can also be integrated into both personal and business settings. While not all devices currently have the operating systems needed to use this feature, creating a campaign for contacts that do can create a whole new experience.
- Mobile Optimization
Because of the advances in smartphone technology, these mobile devices are now considered a necessity in daily life and are taken everywhere a user goes. As such, utilizing mobile-friendly interfaces is becoming more of a necessity for marketers, especially when using email channels to deliver your brand’s messages.
Modern-day Email Marketing Styles For Success
In the modern digital age, new marketing techniques and strategies are constantly being developed to meet the ever-changing needs of today’s consumers. Among the many different channels available now, email marketing continues to be one of the best platforms to promote all types of business.
Apart from being a cost-efficient way to promote your products and services, email can grant you the opportunity to grow and scale your business while creating genuine connections with your customers.
Find the best ways to grow your brand today through Spiralytics’ email marketing services!
