7 Ways That Email Marketing Still Delivers the Goods
It may seem that the online marketing world has become completely obsessed by social media, but savvy promoters know that a well-rounded strategy covering wider bases gives a more stable and longer-lasting result. An essential part of the mix is email marketing, a technique with a long and venerable history. It may not have the trendy appeal of social, but it still works amazingly well, and here’s why.
Excellent Reach
Everyone who spends time online has an email address, meaning the whole market is available for promoting to. Social may have the glamour and glitz, but email has the ubiquity advantage.
High Trust Factor
The arrival of effective spam filters means that email is now widely trusted, and a strong offer delivered from a known company is given more attention than other ephemeral tactics such as online advertising.
More Permanent
An email has a durability that social media lacks. If a recipient is interested in a message, it’s simple to save it for later attention. Compare this to social media, where a promotion can be quickly buried in a busy timeline. This factor gives a useful boost to conversion rates.
Customers Accept Email Promotion
A recent study by MarketingSherpa found that 72% of internet users preferred to receive commercial messages via email, compared to only 17% for social media. Although social media marketing is effective, it’s simply not as widely accepted by customers, leaving marketers something of an uphill task.
Email is Highly Targetable
An email address is easy to link with a customer’s shopping history, making it easy to personalize both the offer and the message itself. Sending individually targeted offers in this way can send conversion rates soaring.
Low Cost
Although building and maintaining an email database can be time-consuming, the costs of actually delivering messages are tiny in comparison with most forms of advertising. This means conversion rates needn’t be off the charts for a campaign to turn a profit.
Control of Traffic
Email marketing also puts traffic solidly under your control. You can space out your campaigns to reach only segments of your list, spreading the resulting business in a way which makes it easier to handle.
Although it once looked like email’s days were numbered as users struggled with the volume of spam, effective filters and stronger enforcement of laws means that unsolicited commercial email isn’t the problem it was. A well-maintained list combined with an attractive offer makes email marketing one of the best performers in an online marketer’s arsenal – is it something you should be paying more attention to?