Sophisticated and Easy
Email Marketing has survived all the new trends like social media and instant messaging, offering audiences the connections they want with brands, on their terms. Today’s platforms from MailChimp and Campaign Monitor etc provide seamless templates to make design easier with formats for newsletters, announcements, editions and promotional needs that make campaigns simple and consistent.
email marketing is the highest return on investment channel in digital marketing
Capture The Attention Of Your Audience
Email is a mature channel, it’s been around since the internet went boom and the technologies are evolving. We have animated GIFs and embedded videos and there are also drop down menus, slide in menus and expanding menus for mobile devices templates. These templates allow for creativity in email marketing, capturing the attention of your audience in their inbox, without the distraction of other brands surrounding your message.
You’re in Control
All brands have felt the impact of Facebook’s changes to the newsfeed and algorithm earlier this year. As the social platforms continue to dominate the landscape of audience contact, brands are losing control of who their audience are. Email marketing means you own your customer’s data and it’s a great channel to collect data from your customers too. You don’t need to rely on the social platforms and their growing rules of engagement.
Using Data to Personalise
Email platforms now provide easy segmentation of your customers, not just based on demographics, but with behavioural data such as previous purchase history. You can target customers based on their geo-location or perhaps based on the last time they opened an email or took action by clicking on content. You can also use integrated data from other platforms, such as Shopify.
Reporting Provides Insights
Understanding your email marketing results is imperative to improving them. The greater success you have at delivering emails to inboxes, the higher return you can expect with every step of the process: open, click and conversion. Testing content such as subject lines, images, copy text etc can all be done through A/B Testing techniques that are provided in platforms. They provide instant results, creating insights that you can deploy in your next campaign. Each campaign should be a test of something, so you can learn what is working best.
Automation
Automation is a process of creating communications which are sent based on a trigger – such as a time frame, or an action. Automated communications are expected and accepted by customers. For example, when signing up to a newsletter, customers expect a confirmation email in their inbox. Or perhaps customers had added a product to their cart but didn’t complete their order, and an email prompting the customer to finish the sale is sent. Thinking out the steps of what should be automated can be the difficult part. Setting up the automation is provided by email platforms with simple steps to follow. For the customer, automation is an opportunity to learn more about for upselling and cross-selling your business services and products.
Content and SEO
Creating content for your newsletters means you’re probably generating content that could live on your website, especially if you’ve committed to a blog. Content delivered through email marketing means links back to your website, and from your website to other destinations. These links build reputation with search engines like Google, and can positively affect your SEO. Search engines look for fresh content, and email marketing can deliver opportunities for this content to be read and shared. This content ensures you remain top of mind with your customers and also provide an opportunity for them to share your emails with friends and connections, gaining reach for your brand and growing your database.
Through all the marketing noise, email marketing stands out as a winner in channel choice for me. It’s easy to set up, easy to manage (with a little planning) and provides the return on investment across time on content, reporting, insights and management.
