Email marketing is a powerful and effective way to connect with your audience.
Bringing it home, consider your own experiences. For example, how often do you get updates on what you care about via email?
From newsletters to the latest election news or COVID-19 vaccine development, promotions, and Black Friday sales to communications with co-workers, colleagues, family, and friends, email is the daily go-to for most people, and many check their email multiple times daily.
Easy, effective, and inexpensive email marketing lets businesses and organizations reach their targeted audience at the right time with the right message and a far more cost-effective strategy than other forms of traditional direct marketing.
The Direct Marketing Association (DMA) says that for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $40 in ROI.
Now, that’s a number I can get behind.
What About Social Media: Doesn’t It Out-Do Email?
The short answer, in my opinion, is “no.”
Don’t get me wrong. I love social media. While Social media has several advantages over email marketing, it also has many disadvantages.
For example, saying the wrong thing at the wrong time on social media can devastate your business.
Social media marketing can also get pretty pricey when you add in the costs of management tools like Later, Buffer, HootSuite, and the like, and paid advertising, which is a must if you want your audience to see your posts, given today’s algorithms. Social media marketing is becoming more expensive and less effective every year.
And finally, I think it’s important to remember that you own your email contact list. Once permitted, you can always reach out to those folks unless asked not to via an unsubscribe request.
If Facebook or Twitter goes away, so goes your social contacts.
How Can You Increase Your Email Marketing Success?
There are a few ways you can up your game regarding email marketing. Check out the following three ideas:
Be Authentic in Your Email Messages
Authenticity is a concept that can help you connect with your audience on a more fundamental level, but it’s not as easy as it may sound.
Authentically marketing presents a few challenges:
- Prepare to tailor your marketing messages to your core audience without dismissing potential engagement from others outside that core.
- Balance sincerity while also meeting lead generation or sales goals.
- Be true to your company’s culture and voice while keeping your ride mainstream enough to resonate with people from all walks of life.
Most brands we love aren’t all that different from the others out there. But being authentic doesn’t mean being different. We must be true to ourselves to gain that loyalty, connection, and trust.
Delivering authenticity in your email content will complement your content marketing efforts, make your organization shine, and show your core audience precisely who you are.
Offer Value to Your Email Marketing Audience
You know how you get fifteen emails daily from that clothing brand store, and each one contains almost a replica of a discount sale as the last? Those go right into your trash file, don’t they?
If you will email your audience regularly, be sure to send them something of value.
Yes, you certainly can (and should!) share promotions!
And give them a little something extra. Share a few posts (if they are valuable, relevant, and practical) from your blog. Talk about what’s happening in your company. Teach them something about how to use your products or services. You get the picture: give them a reason to open your emails every time they hit their inbox.
Address Your Email Recipients Personally
A study by Experian found that personalized emails deliver 6x higher transaction rates!
Personalizing your emails is an excellent step toward targeting your customers more effectively.
Email personalization means targeting your email campaigns to specific subscribers by using the data and information you have about them.
The following are three ways to personalize your email marketing campaigns:
- Address your subscriber by name in the subject line.
- Include content in the email based on a subscriber’s age, location, or other things you know about them, such as their gender pronoun preference or entertainment interests.
- Segment your emails and use that information to create custom content to send to those smaller, more personal lists. For example, one property management company I worked with in Costa Rica segmented its audience by Spanish and English speakers and location. We sent our email campaigns and promotions accordingly.
Email Marketing – An Essential to Your Marketing Efforts
Powerful, personal, and cost-effective, your organization can’t afford not to be doing email marketing. When you own your contact list, you’ll always be able to reach your customers with their permission. Furthermore, you can personalize each communication to get the right message to the right people at the perfect time. Email marketing may be “old-school,” but it will never be outmoded.
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