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Why does your business need email marketing?
While marketing on social media receives a lot of hype in the current digital marketing landscape, Email Marketing is (still) the best way to communicate with existing and potential new clients.
Email marketing takes the conversation about your business to an environment where people spend time every day — their inbox.
Consider these 10 important reasons to include email marketing as part of your marketing plan.
1. E-mail is a more reliable, effective way to reach customers than social media.
This controversy illustrates one of the most important issues with relying on social media alone to reach your customers...
You are promoting and marketing on a leased platform.
And when you lease, you are at the mercy of your landlord.
Organic reach on social media platforms like Facebook continues to decline, perhaps to incentivize businesses to buy more exposure.
In June 2016, Facebook adjusted the News Feed algorithm again so that content from publishers is prioritized lower than before. This is great as a personal user, but as a business-owner, it makes reaching your audience via Facebook more difficult.
On Facebook, if you post an update to 1000 fans only about 20 of them may see it in the News Feed. If you send an email marketing campaign to 1000 subscribers, at least 900 of them should receive it in their inbox.
Consider these statistic comparing email marketing vs. social media:
Email is nearly 40 times better than Facebook and Twitter at acquiring customers. (McKinsey & Company)
Email has a History of Stability
Social Media frequently changes. Algorithms receive updates and new platforms launch yearly.
Email on the other hand, has a very long history of stability. The first "promotional" email campaign was sent in to 400 people in 1978!
Today tools like MailChimp or ActiveCampaign make it easy for business owners and professionals to craft beautiful professional communications and reach out to their clients and customers when they need to without waiting on a developer.
2. Email is the Currency of the Web
What we mean when we say email is the currency of the web is that you have to have an email address to do anything online. When registering for virtually any website on the planet, an active email address is required.
Many people live their whole lives without signing up for a social media account, but chances are, they have an email address.
There is just no social media platform or channel that offers wider reach than email.
And believe it our not, your clients want to hear from you.
70% of people say they always open emails from their favorite companies. (ExactTarget)
Your email subscribers have explicitly indicated they want to hear from you when they opt in to your email list. Of course, no one wants to be bombarded with spam or constant sales pitches, but here are some types of content subscribers respond well to:
Tips and Advice - Don't keep your expertise a secret!
Event Promotions
Special Offers & Discounts
Industry News
Customer Stories or Case Studies
3. Stay Top of Mind
Maintain relationships and build personal relationships by staying in touch with your clients and customers year round.
Even when you haven't worked directly with a client in recent months, or even years, keeping your name fresh in their memory is good thing. You never know when they may be asked for a recommendation by a colleague or need your services again for themselves. Make sure they know your name!
4. Reinforce Your Expertise
People do business with people they know, like, and trust. Email Marketing gives you the ability to build credibility and reinforce expertise by sharing helpful and informative information.
95% of those who opt into email messages from brands find these messages somewhat or very useful. (Salesforce)
5. Email Marketing Yields More Conversions
There isn’t a more powerful channel than email when it comes to conversions.
The average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients). The average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%.
Email marketing yields an average 4,300% return on investment for businesses in the United States. (Direct Marketing Association)
Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention. (Gigaom Research)
6. Generate Traffic to Your Website
Use your email marketing as an opportunity to encourage visitors to click through to your website. Do this by providing an introduction or summary of the content with a clear call to action to click through and read the rest of the information.
Interested users click through to see more - which creates traffic on your site.
7. Boost Sales
When you have an audience of people who are interested in receiving updates from your business, you’ll be able to think differently about how you boost sales throughout the year.
This can go beyond sending a special offer to generate some sales. Reaching out regularly with email marketing can activate dormant customers. (This goes hand-in-hand with staying top of mind.)
For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.25. (EmailExpert)
8. Nurture Leads with an Auto-Responder Series
An autoresponder is a series of emails that are automatically sent to a subscriber on your list. Certain events trigger the autoresponder, such as subscribing, filling out a form or making a purchase.
Companies using email to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at 33% lower cost. And nurtured leads, on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads. (Hubspot)
Create content for an email autoresponder series ahead of time and set it up in your email marketing software likeMailChimp or ActiveCampaign. Create the content one time, and when someone subscribes, it is delivered to them automatically.
Start with a Welcome Auto-Responder
Try using a welcome auto-responder, which is triggered when someone subscribes to your list.
An auto-responder allows you immediately start communicating and building a relationship with leads from the instant they join your list.
There is a psychological "handshake" that occurs when a subscriber opens an email from you. It's the beginning of the trust conversation.
9. Email is the Expected Way to Communicate
91 percent of US adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with (MarketingSherpa, 2015)
Many small businesses and organizations may start out using a personal email account— like Gmail, AOL or Yahoo, for example, to communicate with a group of email contacts via mass email. This is usually done by putting the recipients in the BCC field.
If you mass email from a regular email account, the chances that your communications are being flagged as SPAM are very high - even more so when the email comes from a personal email account. Your communications may not be received reliably (or at all) by some recipients.
Also, no matter how careful you may be to put all the recipients in the BCC field, there will inevitably be an email that goes out where all of the email addresses of your recipients are exposed in the CC field. This is a huge turn off and can reflect negatively on your business.
Interested to Know More?
Don't Wait...Reach Out.
We are pros at creating engaging, well-designed emails that synch with your organization’s brand and follow industry best practices. Want to talk about it?
Liz Eisworth is the founder and lead designer of SangFroid Web located in Alpharetta, GA. As an experienced website designer and SEO strategist, Liz designs custom WordPress websites, optimizes websites for SEO, and leverages Local SEO / Google Business Profiles for business owners who are looking to improve their online presence to earn more traffic and leads. She built her first website for a business in 2003 and her first WordPress website in 2006. Learn more about Liz »
