As a business owner, you’ve probably heard about the wonders of email marketing and how it’s still one of the most effective ways to reach your intended audience. According to Hubspot, email marketing remains one of the most important and effective ways for a business to reach, connect, and engage with customers to build lasting business relationships.
Email marketing, at its most basic, enables businesses to reach potential and existing customers in a timely and cost-effective manner. From personalized messages to product updates, email marketing is a great way to enhance customer engagement, increase brand awareness, and convert leads into loyal customers.
But before we dive in, let’s go back to basics. What exactly is email marketing?
What is email marketing?
Email marketing specifically refers to the act of using email communications to be able to achieve business goals. It forms part of the overarching digital marketing strategy that puts focus on sending out informational or promotional content for potential or existing customers. For instance, emails can be used in a variety of marketing campaigns from lead generation to brand awareness.
What is an email marketing campaign?
An email marketing campaign is a series of email messages sent to inform, persuade, and engage with potential or existing customers. Email marketing campaigns, according to Mailchimp, help businesses connect with their audience to promote their brand and increase sales. It’s a form of marketing that increases customer awareness about new products, discounts, and other new products or services.
Who should use email marketing?
Everyone! Despite the rise of a plethora of digital marketing tools and platforms, email marketing remains the best customer-focused marketing strategy. When running an email marketing campaign, it’s important to note that email marketing is not about you as a company, it’s about your customers and what they are interested in.
What are the types of email marketing?
- Welcome emails – Not only do welcome emails enable you to provide a warm introduction, but it also allows you to set the tone for future email messages. While it sounds simple, a welcome email plays a vital role in your email marketing campaigns as it is considered as one of the best ways to boost organic customer engagement.
- Content/Product emails – A content/product email is a type of announcement email that helps keep your customers informed and engaged about the latest updates about your company as well as provide an exclusive look at new products.
- Newsletters – Like content/product emails, the main purpose of a newsletter is to increase awareness. Sending email newsletters to your customers is a great way to provide valuable information in an easily-digestible format.
- Dedicated emails – Dedicated emails refer to messages that are sent to a segmented audience about a particular topic. It can serve as an announcement email, an event invitation, or a new product offer depending on the type of audience that you are targeting.
- Lead nurturing emails – This type of dedicated email analyzes and targets audiences based on where they are on the sales funnel. Lead nurturing emails aspire to urge recipients to take a specific action through highly-targeted messages. Whether it’s encouraging them to subscribe or avail of a discount, the ultimate goal of a lead nurturing email is to influence a customer’s buying behavior.
- Re-engagement emails – According to Active Campaign, a re-engagement email campaign is a sequence of emails sent to inactive subscribers. The goal of a re-engagement email is to get people to interact with your emails. Re-engagement emails help disengaged subscribers through a series of emails and provide them with relevant content that can win their interest back.
Top 5 reasons why email marketing is important
#1: You can create personalized content
Personalizing your content helps set you apart from the competition. Ultimately, customers want to feel valued. Crafting personalized emails, as part of your broad email marketing campaign, enables you to customize your message to suit your customer’s interests based on where they are in the buying process. For instance, you can send recommended products to customers that have abandoned their cart on your website. This type of email encourages them to explore other products that may be more suited to what they need and urges them to come back and checkout.
#2: Stay engaged with your audience
Email marketing lets you stay engaged with your audience. While social media is a great way to communicate with your customers, email marketing is still the preferred method for businesses as it projects a more professional medium to provide valuable information. Email marketing also makes it easier for businesses to reach their target audience in a timely manner.
#3: Drive traffic to your website
Even your most loyal fans DO NOT visit your website every day. While email marketing is inherently designed to drive traffic to your website, it’s also a great way to remind people about your brand. To make the most out of your email efforts, make sure to include the necessary call-to-actions (CTAs), along with relevant content, to encourage customers to visit your website and, hopefully, take action. Driving traffic to your website helps you generate potential leads that could turn into customers.
#4: You can run cost-effective campaigns
Emails are inexpensive. When it comes to email campaigns, businesses can reach a large number of consumers through affordable email platforms. This works perfectly for small to medium-sized businesses that want to engage potential customers on a tight budget. An email marketing campaign’s cost-effectiveness depends on how a business segments its audience. Segmenting your audience enables you to improve your engagement rates and improve conversions and sales. Through proper audience segmentation, you will be able to reach the right audience at the right time without spending a ton of money.
#5: Easy to track and measure
From A/B testing to monitoring relevant key performance indicators (KPIs), email marketing campaigns enable businesses to optimize their messaging depending on the type of campaign that they are trying to run. Tracking data in real-time is also a critical component of email marketing that identifies areas of improvement. Keeping track of how your emails are performing will allow you to leverage relevant content/products to better target certain segments of your audience.
How can Envision Digital help?
Here at Envision Digital, we maximize your return on investment (ROI) by assessing your current email marketing efforts and develop a highly targeted strategy that focuses on segmented campaigns and highlights your most engaged subscribers. From content creation to reporting and analytics, Envision Digital will help you track how your email marketing campaigns are performing and, based on acquired data, suggest ways to improve future campaigns.
Interested in our services? Let’s connect!
