You may be wondering what email marketing entails and whether or not it is worth the hassle. Email marketing is quite simply sending out emails to a mailing list of both current and prospective clients. It’s exactly like traditional mail marketing, just far more efficient! Running an email campaign has these three basic steps:
1. Plan the campaign – limited time promotion, regular newsletter, etc.
2. Execute the campaign—use a service such as ActiveCampaign to automate the process.
3. Assess performance – track metrics like open rate, click-through rate, and conversions
From there, it’s just rinsed and repeated! You get a sense of what works well, and then you continue to do that.
You may be thinking that email marketing is slowly becoming outdated; after all, it is the oldest form of digital marketing! However, that couldn’t be further from the truth. Here are 4 reasons why you cannot neglect email marketing.
1. Promotional emails still convert in 2019!
You would think that emails aren’t as effective now as they were in the early days of the Internet. I’m talking about the time when people actually got more physical mail than emails! The email marketers of the late 90’s were taking advantage of an untapped source of potential customers.
Fast-forward to the latter end of the 2010’s decade where the average person receives 88 emails a day. You might think it’s hard to compete for the consumers’ attention when their inbox is flooded. Also, consumers today are less naive / more wary when it comes to digital marketing practices.
However, ecommerce conversion rates are highest on email when compared to other sources like search engines or social media. Couple that with the fact that there are 3.8 Billion people who had email in 2018, and you can see how powerful email marketing still is in 2019!
2. Email marketing is about as targeted as marketing gets.
The beauty of email marketing is this: the people are at least somewhat interested in your business, enough so that they’ve given you consent to add them to your mailing list. Quite typically you would use a lead magnet to draw these people in. This tends to be a “freebie” you give the consumer in exchange for their email address. For example, a personal trainer might use a printable version of their workout plan as a lead magnet. You give them your email, they email you the file!
This isn’t like calling every number in the phonebook, nor is it knocking on every door on the street. This is reaching out directly to people who have already expressed some sort of interest. This is why the conversion rate on emails is so high.
It is possible to get even more targeted by segmenting your email list and sending different types of emails to different groups. The more information you collect alongside the emails, the more you can customize your email campaign. Here are some examples of how you can segment your email list:
Location – send tailored offers based on region
Purchase History – specialized content for previous customers
Open Rate – send more emails to those who often open them (and vice versa)
A great email marketing service will have tools to support segmented campaigns. ActiveCampaign is one such service that includes this feature and makes it easy to use.
You can also personalize emails. Something as simple as including their first name in the email instead of a generic “Hello,” makes a difference. The numbers don’t lie – both personalization and segmentation work well. Personalized emails can have conversion rates up to 10% higher, and segmented campaigns see up to 760% more revenue!
3. Email marketing is relatively cheap and low maintenance!
You don’t need a big budget to operate an email marketing campaign. The whole process is highly automated once you put in the hard work upfront. The most difficult part is collecting the emails!
This is where creating a strong lead magnet comes into play. You want to give consumers a great incentive in exchange for their email address. The incentive should still be at a low enough cost to you, so that you aren’t paying too much to acquire the emails.
Finally, email marketing is very simple to maintain. All you need to do is monitor the performance periodically. Digital marketers often use the following metrics:
- Open Rate – how many people opened the email. 20-30% is typical here*.
- Click-through Rate – how many people clicked to your website from the email. Anywhere between 2-5% is normal*.
- Conversion Rate – the ultimate statistic; how many people actually made a transaction!
*Typical values are from ConvertKit.
Monitoring the campaign is easy; services such as ActiveCampaign include in-depth analytics, which allow you to make smarter marketing decisions in the future and improve the ROI of your marketing spending. Speaking of ROI…
4. Investing in a high-quality email marketing campaign can lead to a higher ROI.
There is one thing that digital marketing professionals all agree on – investing in an email marketing campaign can pay off handsomely. The average ROI on an email campaign was $38 per $1 invested in 2015! Can you really go wrong with that type of return?
This is partly because email referrals spend up to 3 times as much on purchases as social media referrals. The other side of the coin is that email campaigns are so cheap to implement (as mentioned in #3). Higher benefits and lower costs mean that you get a higher ROI on your marketing budget.
Putting it All Together
Hopefully, you now see that the importance of email marketing is still growing over 20 years since the commercialization of email. This is a great tactic to get up close and personal with your prospective customers; no other medium of marketing allows for this much personalization. All of this comes at a relatively cheap price, especially when you use a powerful service such as ActiveCampaign. The low-cost and high potential for earnings makes for a great combination – meaning you’ll have a stellar ROI.
Talk about money well spent!
