It may be hard for some to believe, but email marketing is considered to be “old-fashioned” by some of the population. Some businesses hesitate to implement email marketing into their internet marketing strategy because they’re under the impression that most people don’t care about emails as much as they used to. This is a huge misconception.
Your customer’s inbox is a great place for you to be. If done effectively and done within a whole internet marketing strategy, email marketing can help attract new clients, cultivate potential clients and keep existing loyal clients informed and connected. All of these results ultimately lead to increase business and so a return on your email marketing investment! We’ll begin by proving the importance of email in consumer’s lives and then go into different practices you can apply in your email marketing to maximize the amount of opens and your click through rate!
Is Email Marketing Worth the Investment?
Email marketing is more than just writing up an email and sending it off. First, the database of clients that you will send the email to needs to be cultivated and grown through different strategies unique to each business. If you’re a restaurant looking to keep your customers coming back for more, you could grow your email list at your physical locations, online on your website, or even through your social media marketing campaigns. Once you have a list to send to, you need to create email plans to make sure that you are sending at the best time, with the best content, to ensure that your customers want to keep receiving your email. All of these steps may be too time consuming for some business’, so before you invest in hiring a team to effectively market through emails, is email marketing effective?
To begin the tirade of email marketing statistics, there are approximately 4.1 billion email accounts, plenty of potential customers to reach through this medium. Not only do billions of people have access to email, but 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message.
In addition, 7/10 people say they made use of a coupon or discount from an email marketing message. Not only is there evidence from the consumer’s purchasing behaviors, but in a survey 95% of consumers responded that they expected to be pursued by brands as a customer. 55% of companies generate more than 10% of their sales from email marketing, so is email marketing worth the investment? When your ROI is about $44 per dollar spent, would you consider that worth the investment? 81% of online shoppers are more likely to make additional purchases as a result of emails, so yes, yes it is a very effective marketing strategy that is totally worth your business’ investment.
How to Market through Email Effectively
Now that it’s been established that email marketing is a great tool to use in your internet marketing plan, we can present a few tips that will help you get the maximum benefit from your email campaign.
First and foremost, before sending out an email, determine your plan. Each email should have one simple goal and to accomplish that goal you should have a very large and clear call to action. 64% of people say they open an email because of the subject line. So once you determine the goal of an email, say for example it’s to get consumers to redeem a coupon online, write an informative and inviting subject line to get the customer to open the email. Then make sure the coupon, with your call to action, “Use this coupon in the next 24 hours to save” is clear and before the scroll line. You can do the “Squint Test”, where you look at the email you’re about to send and squint your eyes. If you still see your call to action, it’s big enough. If it’s not clear, you should consider enlarging it, so that there is no doubt in your customer’s mind what action should be done after reading your email.
The time in which you send your email out is also an important factor to consider. Although with each industry it will vary a little bit, there are certain metrics that stand true across the board. For example, 76% of email opens occur within the first two days of the email being sent. In addition, the email open rates are noticeable lower on weekends than on weekdays. Emails with social sharing buttons also increase the click through rate of an email by 158%.
Another trend that you will want to take in consideration when composing your email is mobile optimization. 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices and it was reported that 64% of decision-makers read their email via a mobile device. 70% of mobile purchasing decisions are influenced by promotional emails. So basically, all these statistics are leading businesses to make sure their emails are optimized for all screens. Depending on what email service you’re using it is important to make sure that you can either design mobile friendly emails or that there are some templates available.
With all the different strategies available for implementation into your business’ internet marketing campaign, it may be intimidating trying to decide which resources to dedicate time or investment dollars towards.
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