Email Marketing

When businesses talk about their digital marketing efforts, they are often referring to blogging, social media and display advertisements. Very few consider email marketing as a serious contender to generate sales.

However, email marketing can be one of the best ways to connect with your audience and process them further down your sales funnel. By utilising a good email strategy, you should see a significant increase in your online sales and traffic.

Here is why email marketing is one of the best marketing avenues.

1. Penetration

There are more than 3.9 million email accounts currently active in the world. In the developed world, it is believed 95% of all online consumers have an email address and more than 9 out of 10 will check their accounts every day.

In comparison to social media, this is a significantly larger proportion. For example, Twitter has 232 million active users but 651 million users who have abandoned the network.

With email being such an integral part of how we communicate with family, friends and work colleagues, there is little chance for email to be abandoned by the masses. Therefore, your business can be certain that investments in email marketing will yield a return for your business in the long run.

2. Better Reach

Email marketing has a considerable potential to reach your target audience compared to other digital marketing opportunities. The emails you send to your subscribers are nearly always delivered to the contact’s mail box.

According to research, only 18% of email messages are blocked by email servers and 4% are sent to a junk / spam box.

These numbers can be improved by adopting a proper email marketing strategy and best practices.

In contrast, social media updates are less regularly seen by your followers. The potential reach for your updates is stated to be the number followers or likes you profile has. Despite this, only a small fraction of your followers will see content you have published; for example, only 12% of your Facebook followers will see any updates.

Therefore, even with fewer email subscribers; you will have more people reading your email content than your social media updates.

3. Emails Last Longer

The majority of Facebook interactions occur within the first three hours of the update being posted and the lifespan of a Tweet can be gauged within five minutes of being published. After these times, the content simply disappears.

Emails on the other hand, assuming they have been delivered and not deleted, never disappear from the inboxes of your subscribers. Therefore, the subscriber can find your email several days or weeks after they originally received the message and so the lifespan is almost unlimited.

4. Email Marketing Achieves More Sales

Many individuals talk about how they can earn more money through social media sales. However, research has shown that social media is a poor sales conduit with only 1% of all online sales originating from social media.

In contrast, email marketing was the second highest online sales referrer with 13%. Therefore, with one email marketing message, you can achieve significantly more than posting several messages on Twitter, Facebook and Google+.

5. Email Marketing Can Be Analysed More Easily

With the right email marketing program you can monitor the performance of your campaigns much easier. They can track how many people have not received your email content, how many have opened it and the number who have clicked through on your calls to action.

While you can monitor some statistics on your social media profiles, there is very little accurate information to demonstrate how many people have seen your content and it is hard to determine who has made a purchase.

With available email marketing statistics, you can determine who should be removed from your contacts list, what content your audience prefer and finally if your products are appealing to your audience.

6. Email Marketing Can Be Shared Via Social Media And Email

Social media content can only be shared via social networks, and normally only on the platform that it was originally published on.

In contrast, email marketing can be shared on several platforms, including various social media networks and by email. This can increase the reach of your email marketing messages and attract new audiences to your brand.

7. You Can Portray More Information In Email Marketing

This is particularly true when you are comparing email marketing with Twitter. Email allows you to have more than 140 characters so you can create more compelling arguments and present greater industrial authority.

The better your argument; the greater the interaction you can generate.

8. Promotional

Consumers prefer sales content to be presented to them through email. According to research, 77% of consumers welcome promotional email marketing messages, whereas only 4% on Facebook prefer them and 0% on LinkedIn.

70% of promotional coupons and discounts that have been distributed through email marketing campaigns are used by the recipients.

Therefore, you should use social media to create content to demonstrate your authority and expertise, whereas email can be used to promote your products and offers.

9. Personalisation

Nearly every email marketing program has the potential to send thousands of email messages and yet each message can be personalised for the recipient. The email personalisation can include the name, address and even refer to an action the recipient has completed on your website. This allows for greater connection with your audience, which improves the interaction rate.

10. Segregation

Unlike with social media, PPC or other digital marketing content, your email marketing contact list can be segregated. You can send content to your audience based on specific actions; for example, if they have downloaded a specific ebook or requested a quote or where they are in the sales process.

Conclusion

Email marketing is one of the best ways to connect, engage and sell to your audience. There are numerous benefits of email marketing compared to social media, display adverts and even blogging that you will find that not having an email strategy will damage your business’ revenue.

Therefore, start using an email marketing program to deliver personalised messages to your audience and see your business grow.