email marketing

Email marketing is NOT dead: creating a strategy that keeps your customers coming back for more

Posted on by Niamh Sutton

Email marketing is one of the most successful tools you can utilize in growing your business. Despite the noise, email marketing is NOT dead. The trick is deploying a successful strategy, so your email marketing campaign doesn’t fall flat on its face. You may be surprised to learn that email has a larger reach than social media, but you can’t have one without the other in today’s digital marketing landscape. In this blog post, you’ll learn the specifics on why email marketing matters, how to create a strategy that keeps your customers coming back for more, while growing and maintaining your list.

Why email marketing? Hint: It’s in the numbers

  1. Widespread usage – According to Statista (2018) global email users amounted to 3.7 billion in 2017 and this figure is set to grow to 4.3 billion by 2022.
  2. A strong return on investment – For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $32, reports DMA (2018).
  3. Helps your business grow – Email marketing continues to be the driving force of customer retention for small and medium sized businesses with 81 percent still relying on it as their main channel of acquisition, while 80 percent depend on it for retention (Emarsys, 2018).
  4. High open rate – According to 2017 data from GetResponse, welcome emails have a stellar opening rate, in fact 82 percent of welcome emails are opened. However, 21 percent is the average open rate as per statistics from MailChimp (2018).

Creating a strategy that keeps your customers coming back for more

  1. Personalization – Personalized subject lines generate 50 percent higher open rates.  
  2. Interactive email is the way forward – Video rules supreme.2017 data from Martech Advisor’s found that adding video to email can increase the click rate by 300 percent.
  3. Frequency – Customers like to hear from you but make sure you have something to say. Depending on the nature of your business once a month may be enough but a 2017 study from Statista found that 49 percent of consumers said that they would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands on a weekly basis. A/B test your email campaigns. This is the best way to figure out what types of campaigns are more effective in terms of encouraging open rates and click-throughs.

How to grow and maintain a list

  1. Use your POS – Many Point-Of-Sale systems allow you to capture your customers’ email addresses. If you don’t have a sophisticated system, fear not, you can simply ask customers to leave their information by displaying a simple sign-up sheet at your register or have a piece of marketing collateral enclosed with their bill. Pen and paper still get the job done, but it’s imperative that you upload the information into your CRM or even onto a Google doc or excel file. The key is keeping the information all in one place to begin building an effective marketing database.
  2. Creating landing pages – This is another great way to grow your subscriber list. Create a landing page in exchange for freemium content or to unlock a coupon code. The user needs to feel like they are getting something in return for supplying you with their details.Email marketing tools such as MailChimp allow you to create landing pages for free.
  3. Leverage the power of social media – Use your business Facebook page to add a call to action button and set it to sign-ups.Facebook Ads are another effective way to capture that all important email address. You can control the call to action in the ad, so leverage this opportunity to ask for email subscribers.

If you are in the process of launching a new business, take stock and lay the foundation with the right tools NOW to capture your audience from the get-go. If you have an established firm that is not using email marketing, consider making it apart of your marketing plan. It’s a great way to freshen things up if your current initiatives are a little stale and not getting much traction. Lastly, if you’re looking for a partner to create killer marketing copy, manage your database and collaborate on building successful email campaigns then give marketingworx a call today.