Every year, a new app, tool, or channel arrives as a way to reach audiences. From Snapchat filters to live broadcasts of product launches, brands can easily get excited about social media. These channels are highly visible, popular with younger adults, and key for driving traffic to your website.
However, in all of the excitement, brands can’t forget the methods that have helped them grow over the years. Email marketing continues to be an important tool in a brand’s arsenal, even if it’s not as new or exciting as the latest social media app.
Discover the following five signs that email marketing is a strong as ever and will continue to grow in popularity alongside other digital and social trends.
Customers Still Appreciate Email Messages
One of the largest arguments against email marketing is the value to customers. Considering most Americans receive 88 emails daily, constantly creating brand messaging that stands out above the rest seems like a daunting task. However, your customers may be listening more than you think. According to a Marketing Cloud 2014 Mobile Behavior Report, 95 percent of customers who actively opt into email marketing messages find the information useful.
If your customers agree to receive your email messages, they’re eager to find out what your brand has to say and are likely to buy something from you to boost your business. Your customers are telling you exactly what information they want and how they want to receive it. If they didn’t want to receive your emails, they would simply unsubscribe and follow you on social media.
More brands are paying attention to customers who unsubscribe and are inactive. These brands would rather purge the records of people who will not buy from them and focus on core customers who will. This strategy makes the email campaign stronger as the number of targeted customers is higher.
Email Provides Mid-Funnel Content Solutions
The top and bottom of the sales funnel tend to receive the most focus from marketers. You can easily understand how top-of-funnel social and blog content attracts customers or bottom-of-funnel coupons convince people to buy, but a gray area seems to exist for what channels fall into the middle of the funnel and what their purposes may be.
Email serves as a solid middle-funnel player. Customers are typically aware of a brand and its products, but they may still not be ready to make a buying decision. Through email messaging, brands can inform customers about the specific products they need and answer the questions that are holding them back.
For example, an email campaign could highlight the importance of buying something early before the season rush or inform customers about why a certain product is essential at a specific time. From this point, customers who would seriously consider buying a product would move into the bottom of the funnel as they prepare to buy.
Without mid-funnel content sharing and marketing, the top-of-funnel efforts would go to waste and customers may never reach the bottom of the funnel.
Email Campaigns Engage Existing Customers
Acquiring a new customer costs five to 10 times more than engaging an existing customer, and the average existing customer spends 67 percent more than new customers, according to Business.com. Existing customers are known for trying something new, adding extras to their orders, and generally having an easier experience than new buyers. While you need a steady influx of new customers in your business to keep growing, engaging existing clients can improve your overall marketing ROI by growing your sales and reducing costs.
Email campaigns can engage existing customers because most customer addresses get acquired during the checkout process. Even if a brand uses its email campaigns to recruit potential leads, it can use segmentation to target new and returning customers. Companies use email to entice customers with exclusive items, coupons, and information that increases their overall knowledge of the company. Email may not be an exciting marketing platform, but it still serves a purpose in your overall customer acquisition process.
Poor Email Practices Are Dying Out
One of the main reasons why so many blog posts dwell on the death of email is because terrible email practices are falling by the wayside, according to Capterra, forcing marketers to adopt quality email tactics that drive results. A few examples of these practices include the following:
- Segmenting audiences into groups instead of sending messages to a million people each day.
- Investing in personalization, AI, and machine-learning tools instead of sending static email templates.
- Strategically planning when to send emails and how often to prevent burnout.
- Creating content specifically for email marketing.
- Sending emails that aren’t mobile-friendly or interactive with company apps.
Instead of treating email as a tool that almost anyone can use, marketers are starting to treat it with the respect that it deserves. Understanding the correct way to reach audiences and the best times to make that contact is a delicate balance.
Many People Check Their Email Daily
Despite what marketers have to say about email dying out, consumers still use it regularly. Entrepreneur reports studies that have found that 91 percent of Americans check their emails at least once daily, with a large percentage of that group checking for messages multiple times per day. While experts talk about social media addictions and Facebook use, email is still a popular channel for communication.
In fact, many people turn to email for direct messaging, concise brand information, and reduced clutter than what social media provides. Email is a completely different platform with a distinctive experience. As long as email providers can differentiate between social media and email, this form of communication should remain strong.
The key to success with email marketing is knowing why you’re using it. By developing your marketing campaigns as a way to entice existing customers and move them deeper into the sales funnel, you can have more success than trying to broadcast messages as you do on social media. Brands that rise to the challenge can watch both their business and email strategy thrive.
If you’re ready to move your email campaign into the modern era, contact VivosWeb today and learn about our email management solutions. We can create a campaign for your company that drives results and boosts your customer loyalty.
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