Market trends change year after year, but there’s one marketing tool that has been producing the highest return on investment (ROI) for marketers for the past ten years: email marketing. Using an effective strategy can help you generate up to $42 in ROI for every dollar you spend on mass emails. The best part is, it works for businesses of virtually any size or industry.
At PERC, our clients have asked our digital marketing experts time and time again if email marketing is dead. The answer is an astounding no! It’s still one of the most cost-effective methods you can use to boost your digital marketing efforts. Let’s discuss what email marketing is — including its types, benefits, and strategies — to show you why it works.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a digital marketing tool companies use to send commercial messages to promote their products or services. It’s a permission-based strategy where an existing or potential client signs up to receive updates from an organization.
In today’s modern age, many businesses spend all their efforts on social media campaigns. While they’re also crucial aspects of digital marketing, we recommend including emails in overall digital marketing strategies. Here are some reasons why:
- Recent surveys reveal that a whopping 3.9 billion people — or 50% of the world’s population — are email users. This number goes up in developed countries.
- A recent DMA study shows that marketers can achieve a $42 return for every dollar spent on email marketing.
- Emails have an average open rate of 21%. In comparison, Google ads have a click-through rate (CTR) of 2% while Facebook ads have a 0.9% CTR.
- A jaw-dropping 72% of clients prefer using emails for business communications, and 61% of them actually enjoy receiving weekly promotional emails.
Ideally, your email marketing efforts should complement your search engine optimization (SEO), e-commerce, and social media campaigns to boost your lead generation, conversion, and revenue figures.
Types of Emails
You can categorize all the emails you send into three major classifications: transactional, relational, and promotional. You can mix and match these email types to engage, excite, and inspire your readers into action.
Transactional Emails
Brands send transactional emails to facilitate agreed-upon deals between them and their clients, facilitate relationships, or provide updates on transactions. They usually contain valuable information and achieve high open rates. Below are a few examples of typical transactional emails:
- Account creation emails: In most cases, these are some of the first messages brands send to existing and potential clients to develop customer relationships.
- Password reset emails: These email types are essential to applications with passwords and give companies another reason to communicate directly with customers.
- Purchase receipt emails: Whenever corporations close a transaction online, customers expect these emails in their inboxes right away. Delayed purchase receipt emails or ones that end up in the spam folder contribute to a bad user experience for buyers.
- Account notification emails: These email types include updates on web or mobile apps.
Relational Emails
Relational emails are an essential component of email marketing because of the value they provide subscribers. A Digital Marketer study reveals that companies that use relational emails capture 50% more leads than those that don’t.
These emails may not sell a product or service directly, but they help strengthen customer relationships and boost brand loyalty. Here are some of the most popular types of relationship emails:
- Newsletters: Experts estimate that 83% of companies use this content type. Brands usually send out these emails following a consistent schedule and often contain information on events and webinars.
- New content announcement emails: Companies use these email types to publicize a newly uploaded video, blog post, e-book, etc.
- Company updates: Press releases, testimonials, and announcements about new employees are examples of these emails.
- Milestone emails: Consumers nowadays expect no less than personalized messages, the most popular type being birthday emails. These emails can boost transaction rates by up to 481%.
- Surveys: These are ideal tools for creating two-way communication between clients while collecting reviews — an essential success factor in digital marketing.
Promotional Emails
When people think of the term email marketing, they often imagine promotional emails. Brands use them to inform mailing list members about upcoming deals, and they’re the most used marketing emails.
They are also the most recognizable email format out of the three email types, making some customers wary about opening them. While these emails have a lower open rate, they achieve a much higher CTR.
Some examples of promotional emails are:
- Special offer emails: Coupons, discounts, and other deals fall under this category. These email types typically have excellent open rates.
- Product launch emails: These messages include announcements on new products, features, or releases. It’s essential to keep these emails short because they’re not as engaging as offer emails.
- Event invitation emails: Businesses use these messages to inform clients of the value that their events bring.
- Co-marketing emails: Brands sometimes create partnerships with other organizations to offer particular benefits to a shared audience.
- Seasonal campaign emails: New Year’s Eve, Valentine’s Day, Thanksgiving, and Christmas emails fall under this category. The National Retail Federation estimates sales from major holidays to make up 20% of all retail sales.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing is an effective complementary tool for your other digital marketing efforts, from SEO to e-commerce and social media. Let’s look at some of its benefits.
Reach Massive Audiences
Whether you want to get hyper-local or go big in front of global viewers, email marketing is one of the best platforms for sending messages to massive audiences. Social media can help you spread your message to a worldwide audience as well, but there’s no telling how many followers read your content.
Generate Sales
According to recent e-commerce statistics, the global industry is now worth $4.3 trillion and could grow up to $5.4 trillion by 2022. Email marketing is the ideal tool for grabbing a piece of the pie. It can help customers purchase an item with just a few clicks. A tempting call to action (CTA) button can boost your sales as no other platform can.
Minimize Bounce Rates
Bounce rates — the percentage of site visitors who leave your site immediately without checking out your content — can kill your ranking. If you target the right audiences through your email marketing campaigns, you can improve the quality of your site visitors and minimize bounce rates.
Boost Social Engagement
Messages with social sharing links encourage your avid fans to promote your content on their pages. These readers can make your content go viral and achieve high organic engagement levels. Social sharing will not only increase viewership but can also boost your SEO efforts. A Cognitive SEO study reveals that the top five ranked pages are also the most shared on social media sites.
Provide Measurable Results
With email marketing, you can conveniently track what you’re doing right — and where you’re going wrong. Nowadays, you can use software to determine open, click-through, and conversion rates. You can apply changes immediately to improve your campaign.
Email Marketing Strategies
Developing the ideal email marketing strategy for your company can bring in leads, grow your email list, generate more sales, and eventually encourage brand loyalty. Let’s discuss some strategies below so you can create the best technique for you.
Building Your List
The most effective way to achieve your ROI targets is to grow an engaged audience. Here are some tips for building a relevant email list:
- Capture your social media followers. Combining your social media and email marketing efforts can convert fans into loyal customers.
- Display a sign-up form on your site. If visitors like your content enough to register for your mailing list, it will be easier to convert them into customers.
- Create a sign-up sheet. Whether you’re in your store or at an event, we recommend asking interested consumers to join your list.
Whatever technique you choose, remember to develop shareable content. Doing so helps readers promote your message to their families and friends.
Personalization
No, we’re not suggesting creating an individual message for all your subscribers. Email marketing personalization means using customer data to develop messages relevant to your customer’s journey.
You can segment your readers using these factors:
- Purchase history
- Browsing behavior
- Content interest
- Sales funnel stage
- Engagement level
Once you determine your objectives with each segment, you can create content that will resonate with your readers.
Automation
Automating your emails allows you to reach audiences with the right message at the ideal moment without sending your marketing department on overdrive. You can link your analytics to your email marketing platform to complement your campaigns.
We recommend sending trigger-based emails like welcome and thank you messages to enhance the customer experience. Here are some reasons why you should consider this strategy:
- Trigger emails achieve open rates as much as 95% higher than traditional ones.
- These emails can double the CTR of traditional ones.
- Global sites with the best conversion rates use trigger emails.
- You can achieve 4x more revenue and 18x better profits with this email type.
It’s time to automate your email campaigns so your team can focus on other high-value activities.
Take Your Email Marketing to the Next Level
With the right email marketing tools and strategies, you can send mass emails to achieve your SEO, sales, and digital marketing targets. It’s one of the fastest, most cost-effective marketing branches ideal for virtually any business size and industry.
At PERC, we have highly motivated experts using the latest tools to help our clients achieve exponential growth. Check out our email marketing services to discover how we can help you reach new heights.
Sources:
- Digital Marketer
https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/email-marketing/
- Campaign Monitor
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/why-email/
- Super Office