As social media and other digital technologies have become integral to marketing online, many people within the industry expected email marketing to fade away and eventually become obsolete. However, there is a significant amount of evidence that suggests email marketing is very much still alive and proving itself as a reliable tool for marketers.
In 2021 alone, it is estimated that there were around 4 billion email users, with this predicted to increase to roughly 4.6 billion worldwide by 2025. Additionally, over 300 billion emails are forecasted to be sent and received every day during 2022. If these numbers don’t prove that there’s still a place for effective email marketing, then nothing will!
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing and digital marketing that utilises emails to promote a business’ products and services. It’s a great way to make your customers and people in your mailing list aware of your latest items or offers by implementing it into your marketing automation efforts. Also, it can play an essential role in your overall marketing strategy with lead generation, brand awareness, developing relationships, and keeping customers engaged with your business in between purchases all effectively achievable with email marketing.
How does email marketing work?
Email marketing is not too much of a difficult process, but it does take a lot of A/B testing to determine the best way to communicate with your subscribers in a way that benefits both them and you as a business. Below we’ll be looking at the key steps involved in the email marketing process that encourage subscribers to follow the call to action and ultimately make a purchase.
Use an email marketing tool
It’s possible to make your email marketing communications completely automated with the help of an efficient marketing tool. Attempting to use your personal account to email hundreds, potentially thousands, of people and manually keep track of the results won’t work. So, the first step in a good email marketing campaign is to have a tool or platform in place to help monitor the results. An email marketing platform will help you to:
Create a list of email addresses
Add users to your list via multiple different methods
Send emails to your audience
View reports on how many people open your emails and interact with them (click a link within the email)
Use customisable options to segment your audience based on certain criteria
Generate retargeting audiences on Facebook based on your email list
Automate various email tasks like sending a welcome email to your subscribers or other emails based on their actions
Sell your products or services directly by email
Put together email funnels to redirect users to pages/products/actions you want them to take
Develop an email marketing strategy
Like with any type of digital marketing campaign, the first thing you need to do with email marketing is create a strategy. Having this in place before you initiate any campaigns will allow you to:
Decide how email marketing will be used alongside any other online campaigns you’ll be running.
Determine which email marketing platform to use and work out your monthly costs.
Make a decision on which strategies you want to use to grow your email list.
Determine when to use automation, what kind of messages you want to send and when.
Have the right reporting mechanisms in place to monitor the effectiveness of your email campaigns.
Construct and grow your email list
For email marketing to be successful you need to have a large list of active subscribers so the most important part of your strategy should be growing your email list. This doesn’t mean just adding random people to your list, but people who have manually registered to get your emails. Building and maintaining an email list can be tricky but with the right approach and tools, it can be a useful asset to your business.
Set up automation tasks
One of the main benefits of email marketing is that it can be completely automated. When referring to email marketing automation, we mean sending targeted emails to your users that are based on the actions they take when they open your emails or perform whilst on your website. Welcome emails, email newsletters, and abandoned cart emails are common examples of automation tasks.
Monitor and improve campaign performance with A/B testing
As well as having the right type of people subscribed to your mailing list, running an effective email marketing campaign involves a great deal of A/B testing. This will help you see what kind of email messages can possibly produce higher user engagement and create more conversions. Different factors you can test include:
The length of email subject lines
The format of the emails (HTML, text, with or without images)
The length of the email body
How often emails are sent
The number of promotional messages in the email
Positioning of your signup forms
The messaging used in signup forms
The ‘offers’ used as incentives for email signup
The authentication method used to confirm the validity of emails (no authentication, double-opt-in)
To carry out any type of A/B testing (not just emails) you need to measure the right metrics and mitigate any factors that could impact the results of your testing. For email marketing you should be monitoring the following metrics:
Number of new email subscribers a day
The method they have followed to subscribe to your list (if you have several placements such as a sidebar, exit popups, etc)
Email open rates and click-through rates
The number of people that visited your website from a link in an email
The number of conversions that occurred from an email (and from which campaign)
What are the benefits of email marketing?
Here are the most important reasons why you should include email campaigns in your digital marketing strategy:
Allows for personalisation
Email marketing allows marketers to create customised content for subscribers in accordance with their buying patterns, journeys, behaviours, and other factors. You can use data trackers and analytics to find out what particular interests your consumers have. As well as what sort of products or content they like most.
For example, if your consumers have bought specific products before or left them in their online basket, you can personalise emails by including related products. In essence, you can use email automation software tools to see where customers are in your sales funnel, segment your emails, and produce personalised email content to guide them to the next stage and so on until they hopefully convert.
It generates better outcomes than other marketing channels
It might seem surprising, but email marketing gives the highest ROI (return-on-investment) compared to multiple other marketing means. Also, it often provides better conversion rates. Studies have shown that email produces 66% of conversions, making it 40-times more efficient and successful than other social media channels. To make sure you get the best results, it’s important to regularly monitor the metrics of your email marketing campaign, e.g., click-through rates to landing pages, bounce rates, engagement, etc.
It cuts costs
In comparison to traditional approaches to marketing, email is both cost-effective and easy to implement. You don’t need a big budget to advertise, produce, or print the ad, which means you can save money. Also, as people are relying on mobile phones more and more now, email is a simple yet effective way to connect with potential customers without breaking the bank.
It create brand loyalty and connection
Email marketing campaigns are one of the most effective ways of increasing brand awareness amongst customers. When your subscribers have a better understanding of what your business stands for, the likelihood is they will engage and connect with it much better. So, to develop a strong connection with users, long-term email marketing strategies are sure to keep people actively waiting for your next email.
It blends well with other marketing methods
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing is that you can smoothly integrate it with other social channels like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. For example, you could put social platform icons in emails to encourage readers to follow and engage with you on social media.
Summary
To answer the overarching question of this article, ‘is email marketing still effective?’ yes, email marketing can definitely still be effective in 2022 when used correctly. If you’re looking for professional outsourced email marketing, we can help. Our team have extensive experience in email marketing and will ensure your campaigns are set up specifically to meet the needs and goals of your business and be as successful as possible.
Contact us today to find out more about how we can help your business with email marketing and to request a free audit of your current website.