Don’t believe the rumors—email marketing is not dead.
Social media may steal the limelight, while paid advertising is rapidly becoming a core component of the modern marketer’s strategy for success.
However, it is the long-established medium of email that people should place their trust in. It may not have the same buzz as other marketing channels, but make no mistake: Email is incredibly powerful.
In this article, we’re going to reveal just what email marketing can do for your brand, how to make the case for email marketing, and show you how you can launch email campaigns that do more for your business.
So, what makes email so special? How can you convince your boss that it will offer more than the other marketing channels can’t? Let’s find out:
You don’t need to waste your time with bad leads, especially if you’re a new business with a limited budget.
Thankfully, email marketing is a great system for lead qualifying, as it helps you determine the level of interest people have in your products and services.
You can gauge this interest by:
A simple sign-up form is one of the most basic ways of generating leads. You can build your list by encouraging people to share your email content with their own audiences.
By forwarding it to their friends and family, or through social sharing, your current subscribers can become brand advocates that help you grow your audience.
Webflow encourages sharing by offering a beta version of their product:
Image: Really Good Emails
The secret to successful email marketing lies in your ability to nurture a relationship with your prospects. In doing this, you can build the trust needed to turn followers into customers.
One method of maximizing your conversion rates is through segmentation. This allows you to target specific sub-groups within your list with content tailored to their needs.
As you get better at this, you can deliver the right message to the right person, at the right time, which makes a sale or conversion more likely.
While the benefits are clear, the strategy you need to send better emails is a little more complex. But don’t worry, we’re here to help!
Here are some helpful tips and tricks you can use to send emails that people can’t wait to open.
The average office employee receives more than 120 emails every day. If your business hopes to get noticed among all the competition, you need to grab attention immediately.
Without a great subject line, all that amazing content inside will never be read. Here are a few ways to improve your subject lines to drive open rates:
People don’t read emails like they read books. They skim through content to glean the gist of things, stopping at points that catch their attention.
To engage more people, you must structure your email content for easy scanning. Here are a few essentials:
Notice how Big Sea Design Agency has used different font sizes, white space, and short sentences to make this email easy to scan:
Image: Campaign Monitor
In email marketing, your business has the opportunity to create a relationship with subscribers using a personable and conversational style of communication.
It’s fine to use a more casual tone, but we shouldn’t forget that this is still marketing—Don’t send pointless emails that are irrelevant to your business goals!
As many as 63% of millennials are willing to share information with brands when they receive personalized content.
By crafting interesting and benefit-focused copy, you can convey the value of your products and services in a way that resonates with recipients.
Spotify uses personalized emails to recommend songs to their listeners, motivating them to use the service more.
Image: Really Good Emails
In order to use personalization to its full effect, you should create multiple email sequences for smaller subsects of your mailing list.
Let’s say, for example, your business sells footwear. The approach to selling sports trainers to young women will differ greatly from your method of selling formal shoes to middle-aged businessmen.
By using email marketing segmentation, you can deliver targeted content to both groups, with language, images, and offers that appeal to each group on a more personal level.
Adidas use segmentation to target by gender, sending men and women different product offers through email.
Image: Campaign Monitor
Ultimately, you should view every email you send to your list as another stepping stone in your sales funnel. People will be at different stages of the buyer’s journey, but through segmentation and personalization, you can guide them all.
A key component of that is using a clear, strong call-to-action in every email. It doesn’t have to be a push for a sale—It could simply be a gentle nudge towards some valuable resource, or encouraging people to share your content on social media.
Little-by-little, you can build trust with your audience which makes the bigger CTAs more likely to succeed down the line.
Parkrun has a simple CTA that invites people to read a story about one of their members.
Image: Campaign Monitor
It’s time that we talked about one of the biggest reasons email marketing is so successful in the modern age: Data analytics.
It may sound unrelated to your role as a marketer initially, but data is what gives marketers the power to make email profitable.
By tracking the performance of your emails, you can analyze the open rates, clicks, and shares to see how engaging people find your content.
Keep an eye on your email data to see what’s working, and what’s not. A great way to figure that out is to perform A/B split testing, which allows you to test multiple versions of your emails o determine which gets the most engagement.
We could just give you these tips and wish you good luck, but to make you truly believe how email can pay off, here are a few success stories that show you just what it is capable of.
Email was never a part of the marketing plan for QIS packaging. They didn’t consider how it would help them sell their wrapping products to people.
When QIS decided to outsource some simple marketing, they weren’t prepared for the results, especially as the company did relatively little.
And yet, just by cleaning the email list, creating a sale, and then sending a campaign of three separate emails, they delivered a massive 800% return on investment (ROI) for QIS.
Comparatively, this was more successful than any of their other paid marketing channels, effectively making them big believers.
While the laptop market has experienced a decline in sales overall, Dell is one company that refuses to settle for the status quo.
Their flagship XPS 12 transforms from a laptop into a tablet. To many people, that sounds fascinating, but many prospects need a little convincing before they pull out their wallet.
Dell wanted to engage more people, and they knew a simple written email wouldn’t suffice. Instead, they opted for a GIF that showed the transformation in action.
Not only did this answer many questions, but it also encouraged sales, as Dell enjoyed a 109% bump in revenue.
Despite the doubts of many people, Zumba has remained steadfast in the face of criticism to cement its place in the fitness world.
Email has been instrumental to the success of Zumba, as the company jumped on-board with some of the strategies we discussed earlier.
By showing a compilation of past conventions, and then leveraging a personalized call-to-action at the end.
This clever personalization worked incredibly well, helping Zumba earn a 50% open rate—almost twice the average rate.
Over the next few years, more and more businesses will come face-to-face with the realities of the digital. It is the companies that embrace digital marketing strategies and innovative tools who will come out on top.
Email has been around longer than many of the advanced marketing techniques and tricks currently in play. But it has evolved to incorporate many of the key drivers of modern marketing, such as data analytics, segmentation, and personalization.
By bringing these philosophies together, you can devise an email marketing strategy that helps you grow a loyal audience of trusted brand advocates, who will share your content, and buy your products.
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