Top Benefits & ROI with Effective Email Marketing
For a small business, it is a crucial decision as to where they spend on marketing. Effective marketing calls for lead generation as well as engaging current customers. However, it is vital that the digital marketing tactics being used are cost-effective and drive results. The simple answer to all such demands is email marketing. Yes, although email marketing has been around for a while it continues to drive significant results for both large and small businesses. There used to be a time when companies used to focus exclusively on discounts and promotions through their emails. But these trends have been discontinued in favour of content that is relevant and actually matters to a targeted audience. Presently, going by the statistics an enormous 4.3 billion people are likely to use email by 2023, which is 57% of the entire population of the world. Indeed, this is a medium that can derive substantial benefits to a marketing campaign. Let’s look at them one by one: Benefits of Email Marketing Generic Advantages with Email Marketing Drive More Conversions: An email marketing campaign is known to provide higher conversion rates than other online marketing strategies. In fact, a McKinsey report cites that the average order value (AOV) through an email is 3x times higher than AOV from social media posts. Well-written emails with clear CTAs can actually encourage readers in taking the next step in the buyer’s journey moving them closer to the all-important purchase. E-commerce email marketing drives more sales with a better return on investment(ROI)compared to other modes of marketing Reading Probability High: Email is a medium that has become part of our everyday life and we make it a point to check emails at least a couple of times in a day. Smartphones have made email access all the easier. All this points to the fact that if the email gets delivered to an Inbox, the chances of it getting read is quite high. Unlike other mediums where the message gets lost in the crowd. An email certainly does put you in front of your target audience. Cost-Effective Messaging: If you happen to go by the traditional forms of marketing – print and media. The advertising costs are quite substantial. Compare that to email marketing and the cost comes down significantly in terms of time and resources involved in developing content. In fact, according to one report, a business can expect a return of $40 for every dollar spent on email marketing, which is a healthy return on investment. Increase Traffic to Website: Email marketing when done purposefully can drive a notable amount of traffic to the website. All you have to do is craft a message with pertinent CTA to direct the user to relevant website content or a special landing page. If you want to make the CTA more apparent then you must make the CTA button colourful and grab user attention to it. Improves Brand Awareness: Any business that executes email marketing is benefited by improved brand awareness. Craft relevant messages and send them directly to the Inbox of new customers to improve brand recognition. By doing so consistently over a period of time will make them seriously consider making your brand a part of their everyday life. Helps Build Credibility: Customers are more likely to gravitate towards a business or brand they can trust. Email paves the way in building that credibility with an audience through useful and informative content that adds value. Many brands are known to deliver monthly newsletters to their audience providing valuable, meaningful and relevant content. Through the process of delivering accurate and reliable information, the brand stands to gain in terms of being looked at as an authority in the industry. Strengthens Customer Relationships: Apart from building credibility an email certainly helps in building relationships with new leads and existing customers like social media marketing. Through a series of emails done with consistency providing relevant content can actually educate them about the brand – a relationship can be nurtured. In the long-term, your brand is likely to remain on top of their mind when they are in the market with a buying intent. Email is Shareable: One of the axioms of content marketing is that more shares you generate the better it is for the brand. In fact, it is free publicity. It is advantageous for a brand to make the email message shareable. This can be easily done by including social media and email share buttons in the email message to enable easy sharing of their favourite brand message with their friends, family and colleagues. This improves outreach and brings in new leads. Offers Personal Touch: Emails allow brands to personalize the messaging and offers outreach to the right audience at the right time. Personalization can happen through audience segmentation, where you can address any number of subscribers with their first name making it sound like you are addressing them directly. This approach heightens the probability of a quick response from the audience. Besides, addressing the reader by the first name improves the click-through rates. Saves Valuable Time: While there may be other long-drawn approaches in digital marketing that take longer to implement and offer results only in the long term. In contrast, email marketing is rather quick and direct. Once you learn the basics to run an email campaign and become familiar with email marketing tools and platforms. Then it is easy to create and disseminate emails in a professional manner and the results are bound to follow. Reach Customers in Real Time: If you consider traditional marketing channels ads, flyers and commercials, they are limited by their inability to communicate with the audience in real-time. Take email marketing and you have a medium that allows such communication. For instance, if you want to inform about a last-minute sale or a promotion about to expire, all you need is to put together a message and send it to your select audience segment to enable them to take advantage of the message. Periodic Communication: This pertains to the advantage offered by email, wherein you can correspond with your audience quite frequently. Building a sustainable business requires new conversions to be made while retaining existing customers. By utilizing email you can consistently remind your subscribers about the value your brand can provide. This is a perfect way to remain in touch with the audience in-between purchases and also an opportunity to nurture new leads. Technical Advantages with Email Marketing Enables Content Optimization: Email marketing allows you to identify content that best resonates with your audience and helps improve it for optimum results. Through list segmentation and demographic targeting, you will have a comprehensive strategy to reach your audience segments. Once you have analytical data, you will have the advantage of improving the messaging and offerings for better open-rates and conversions. Allows Content Repurposing: The great thing about content is that it can be repurposed. Take the content that gets used in your email copy. The same content can be used to create social media posts without having to start from scratch. Alternatively, you can also use email marketing to get traction on your social media handles by running a contest that will drive traffic and engagement to the social media accounts. Less Dependency on SEO & Paid Advertising: Once you have an exhaustive email list in place, you have direct access to your subscriber’s inbox. No longer you will be dependent on social media platforms and search results to get your brand message across. Moreover, your patience will not wear thin by waiting for results from SEO initiatives. With email marketing, your email list will become a great asset to your business that offers benefits for a really long time. Email is Versatile: One of the unique benefits of email marketing is that it offers versatility for communicating messages to your audience. You are not just limited to text messages, in fact, you can include video, attachments, and links to relevant content. For instance, if your brand has created content assets that are to be shared. Then the email is the perfect vehicle for getting a “how-to” video or an e-book across to your subscribers. You could simply embed, attach or link to the relevant content into your email message. Access from Any Device: More people are checking their emails on devices apart from desktops. The email has become a medium that can be accessed from anywhere on any device. Thereby improving visibility and reach over time. As a business, you must remain mindful about the majority accessing emails on mobile devices and craft the message in a manner that aligns with the needs of the small screens. Easy to Track & Measure: Unlike traditional forms of advertising, where the results are dependent on guesswork and the sales data. Digital marketing strategies are trackable and measurable and email marketing is no different. You can have accurate data on how many people are opening, reading and clicking through your email content. This allows you to gauge the performance of the email campaigns and allows you to tweak subject lines, messaging, type of offers for better results. Automate the Sales Cycle: Technology today allows you to automate your email campaigns. You can carry out email drip campaigns where a series of emails are sent to the prospect on a set schedule. In addition, you can set up automatic campaigns that trigger messages when the user takes action on the website. For example, if a visitor leaves the site midway, you can reach back to them through automated messages to clarify any question that they might have. Return on Investment (ROI) of Email Marketing Campaigns ROI is an essential metric that quantifies the efforts invested in email campaigns, especially for e-commerce marketing. As mentioned earlier, email marketing is known to generate $40 on every dollar that is spent. This number clearly indicates emails bring in real value for money. While calculating ROI, it is not necessary to restrict yourself to sales and revenue but you could also include leads generated and website traffic as possible parameters to measure ROI. Importance of Return on Investment Running a business without any idea about the performance of a marketing strategy is detrimental to the health of a business. This is the reason why ROI must be calculated when you are running an email marketing campaign to know whether the campaign is actually bringing any revenue or it is just bleeding your business. The Mechanism to Calculate ROI Spend Value: The most obvious expenditure for ROI pertains to the amount of getting spent on the email service provider (ESP). This also involves the cost associated with the marketer spending time on executing, monitoring and measuring the email campaign. Gain: You can integrate your email campaigns with Google Analytics and trace every sale that comes through email. This can be for a specific campaign or over a certain period of time. The gain is then calculated based on the value of a lead, trace every conversion that can be attributed to an email campaign. Then multiply the number of conversions with the value of a lead to arrive on the total revenue brought in by the email campaign. Website Traffic as metric for Return on Investment (ROI) Another major goal of Email marketing is generating traffic to the website. To grow your business and improve awareness, you need visitors to the website who need to become familiar with what you have to offer. Email marketing can contribute significantly towards getting traffic to the site apart from SEO and paid advertising. To check whether email campaigns are prompting readers to visit your site, you can take the help of these two metrics: Click through Rate (CTR): This is the number associated with how many readers click links in the email. To calculate this divide the number of unique clicks by the number of delivered emails and multiply the figure by 100 to get the percentage value. Click to Open Rate (CTOR): This is the number associated with the number of people who opened the emails and clicked the links. Calculate this by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of unique opens and multiply by 100 to get the percentage value. Both these metrics allow you to understand how well the email content is performing along with the CTA buttons. The higher magnitude of these metrics directly correlates to the higher traffic and better ranking on search results. Conclusion We started this blog by mentioning the benefits of Email marketing as a strategy that triumphs other online strategies. This powerful strategy allows businesses of all sizes and to engage with their audience wherever they may be. Further, every business executing digital marketing must have email marketing as a priority as it is cost-effective and makes a brand less dependent on other paid platforms thus saving on ad costs. Once a brand is in possession of an exhaustive email list, it is bound to reap benefits in terms of business growth, new customers and strengthened relationships with existing customers. Coming to ROI of email marketing, it gives a brand the necessary indication about the performance of an email campaign. Without performance metrics, it is difficult for a brand judge whether goals are being achieved and how much improvement is required to do the same. ROI can give accurate answers to such questions. Moreover, calculating ROI has become easy with the availability of automated email marketing software which comes with built-in analytics that can give better clarity and insights into ROI.