What Is Email Marketing And Why Your Business Needs It
Nowadays, almost every small business runs its own Facebook, Twitter and Instagram account to engage with customers. But there is another promising channel to consider integrating in your marketing mix: email. If you haven’t yet thought about this cost-efficient channel, now is the right time. In this blog post, we will answer the two questions: What is email marketing and how can your business benefit from it?
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a part of direct marketing and enables businesses to interact with customers or prospects. From a weekly newsletter to complex retargeting scenarios, email marketing strategies may vary greatly from business to business. Businesses may increase sales, increase customer loyalty, generate leads and approach their different target groups individually. Free email marketing tools like Mailchimp, Sendinblue or Cleverreach provide a great opportunity for businesses to quickly get started with almost no financial investment.
The benefits of email marketing are versatile. Let’s take a look:
People Want to Hear from You
Those who sign up for your newsletter do so on purpose. In other words: they proactively decide to get updates from you! In order to have a continuously growing number of recipients, it is your task to deliver content they really care about. Only by delivering relevant content people will stay engaged and open your mailings.
To start, it is as easy, as placing a sign-up form on your website asking your visitors to leave their email address if they want to receive regular updates from your business.
You Decide who Receives the Content
Email marketing allows your business to approach customers in a way that’s highly targeted and individualised. Today’s email marketing software offers great ways to segment different groups e.g. by gender or by an age cluster. The more information you have about your recipients, the better you can target your content.
Great Content Increases your Brand Awareness
We’ve all received at least once an email with e.g. a great deal or a competition that we shared with a friend. Email can easily be forwarded to anyone with just one click. Once you provide relevant content with special offers or discounts, people will share it. Ultimately, you increase your brand awareness among people you did not even target.
Measure your Success and Perform Even Better
Which content do your recipients enjoy reading? Which colors make them click on a button? Do your recipients prefer text-heavy over image-heavy content? Measuring the effectiveness of your mailings is easy. Almost every email marketing tool on the market tracks the two major key performance indicators (KPIs):
Opening rate: once delivered into the inbox, you want the recipient to open your mail. A strong subject line is the key to success. Test out different subjects to see what type of subject line performs best and increases the opening rate.
Click-Through Rate: we enter the next stage. After opening and reading the email, relevant content will make people interact. Ultimately, they’ll click a call-to-action button that redirects to your website to get more information about a product or to make a purchase. The more people click, the better the click-through-rate.
No matter which new marketing channels you experiment with, consider email marketing the backbone of your marketing efforts. It’s targeted and shareable and allows you to closely measure your success.
