Email Marketing is the Most Effective Form of Digital Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing and should be a central part of any online sales path you have. Despite its effectiveness, businesses are often slow at adopting email marketing and building their contacts list.

The reason behind this is because businesses tend to see the difficulty in building a list and creating content for release. It is true that a single email can often take two or three hours to create, edit and schedule. It is also difficult to build an email marketing list and buying a list can be illegal not to mention damaging in the long term.

Yet this should not be your end decision. Email marketing has a lot to offer businesses and you can benefit significantly from your email marketing campaigns.

So why is it a highly effective form of digital marketing?

The Return On Investment

Research has shown that email marketing has a steadily increasing ROI. In 2013, the ROI was between $25 and $30 for every $1 spent. This was an improvement on the previous year, which saw an ROI of $20 for every $1 spent. Other research has placed ROI at around 4,300%.

Email marketing is also the third highest contributor to online sales (approximately 12%) where the brand and customer have already interacted. In comparison, social media contributes to only 1% of all online sales, even if both parties know each other.

It is the matter of the cheapness of email marketing that makes it so effective for marketing. Many small businesses can have a free email marketing account on many providers and send up to 12,000 emails in one month. Therefore, it would take only a small percentage of those receiving an email message to make a purchase for the campaign to show a positive ROI.

This isn’t too hard to achieve. The average click through rate is somewhere between 1 and 5% (depending on industry). Therefore, out of 12,000 emails, you should have up to 600 visitors from your email marketing campaign. All of these will be known individuals, who are easier to sell to and cost far less to convert.

Audiences And Emails

It isn’t just the ROI that should please businesses. The strength and receptiveness of the audience should also be considered.

In 2013, there were 3.6 billion email addresses, that is more users than Facebook and Twitter combined. These users were also far more receptive to promotional material through emails, with 74% preferring this medium. Further to this, 66% of consumers have made a purchase after receiving an email marketing message.

Your content is also active for longer than it is on Twitter or Facebook. The lifespan of a Tweet and Facebook update is approximately 10 minutes and 2 hours respectively. With emails, the message is active until it is deleted by the account holder. Studies have also shown that while a majority of the opens are within two days of the message being sent, a quarter happen after this period and therefore, your email message has longevity.

Email users are also very addicted to their accounts. Nearly all email users will check their accounts at least once a day. Twitter and Facebook do not achieve such success, with Twitter only having around 50% active users.

Users are also using their mobile devices more to check their emails. Therefore, your marketing messages can be received on the go. In 2013, the open rate for emails on a mobile device was 48%.

The problem is, the majority of email marketing messages have not been optimised for mobile devices. This can cause upset and limit the reach of your content. Research has shown audiences are highly likely to delete email marketing messages that are not optimised for mobile. Therefore, if you want success via email marketing; check they display right on mobile devices.

Email Marketing Tracking

It is also very easy to track the success of your email marketing campaigns. There is a lot of email marketing software available that allows you to track the open rate, click through rate and other metrics. This can be very powerful.

First, you can make your campaigns more efficient by suppressing audience members that have not interacted with your brand for a long time. This can have a benefit of seeing your deliverability rise by 3-5% almost instantly. The better your deliverability the higher your reputation is. This can impact the number of people who see your content.

Tracking also allows you to make sales through other channels. For instance, you can see if someone is constantly opening up your mails and clicking through on offers but not converting. You can contact them via phone and speak to them. They will remember your email, your brand and be more interested in doing business

At a lower level, you can see what offers are interesting your audience and create a new email campaign based on those trends. This will convert better as it is what your audience wants.

However, some businesses don’t take advantage of this ability with 17% not monitoring the success of their campaigns at all.

Email Is A Success

The reason why all this is can happen is because of two major points. Email marketing is personable. That is that you can tailor your messages so that they can be relatable to your audience. This is done in several ways:

• Using unique identifiers (name, company, address) etc in your email copy.
• Segmenting your campaigns so that they are targeted and content is only sent to those who have shown interest in that topic.
• Sending the email at a time which they are likely to available to read.

The content is also permissible; this means that the audience has given you permission to contact them. This makes the audience far more receptive to the marketing message. Therefore, you will have better results.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to generate interest in your brands and products. It has a high ROI and engagement rates from your audience. It is also the best way to track how your audience reacts to your content and gives you ideas how you can improve your message to gain more sales and interest from your audience, thus improving the revenue generated from your small targeted audience.