Why email should remain a priority for digital marketers
When considering your opportunities to reach and connect with consumers, the first challenge that almost every marketing manager faces is the overwhelming plethora of choice. With SEO, social media marketing, PPC and display advertising to name a few, how do you judge the value of one digital channel against another?
Alan Lam is a digital marketer at Thinking Juice.
With marketers increasingly spending time deciphering new and innovative channels, it’s easy to neglect established channels in favour of the fresh and exciting. For this reason, this blog will focus on translating the three leading benefits of good-old fashioned email marketing to help you assess its current and future role in your marketing mix.
Have full control of your future
If you invest considerably in Google or Facebook, you need to be aware that traffic is not guaranteed in the future. Google rankings and Facebook newsfeed results are controlled by algorithms that are unpredictable and frequently change, having an adverse effect on the amount of traffic you achieve.
Instead, you can invest in something that you can have complete ownership and control over – your mailing list. In contrast to Google, should you ever feel disappointed with the service or any changes made by your email provider, you can simply export your list and move on. The ability to completely control the reach of your marketing is not something to be taken for granted.
Generate revenue automatically
Here’s a little secret about email marketing that not many people realise - it saves time and money. Imagine a user shows interest in one of your products and opts into your email list, you’ve made a good start. Using pre-written emails, you can then follow-up with customers automatically using ESPs like Mailchimp. These providers give you the ability to send batches of emails and ‘strike while the iron’s hot’ in order to remain front-of-mind and nurture prospects into paying customers. This system then frees you up to work on other important things.
Importantly, automation emails have been proven to convert like crazy. According to an industry report by eMarketer, automated emails can convert as much as 50 per cent. That’s extraordinary bearing in mind that the average ecommerce conversion rate is between 2 to 3 per cent.
Choose the highest ROI
According to the Direct Marketing Association, the ROI for email marketing is around 4300%, bringing in £40 for every £1 spent. Email outperforms search, display and social media marketing.
The reason for such a high ROI is because email gives marketers a platform to build customer relationships on an ongoing and direct basis. Being granted access to your customers most prized asset – their inbox – gives you an opportunity to make your very best first impression. You then have a space to communicate with customers on an on-going basis and share personalised, relevant content in order to sell.
Comparatively speaking, using Google or social media channels to follow-up with your customers is suboptimal because you can’t reach out to them as directly. So if a customer wants your products but for some reason became distracted, you can’t follow-up with them. That’s money left on the table. With email however, you have a platform to reach out, capture hot leads and build customer relationships that result in this fantastic ROI.
Every channel offers unique benefits and ways to connect with customers. Hopefully these benefits will help you to assess whether email is the best way to grow your business.
Alan Lam is a digital marketer at Thinking Juice
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