Why is Email Marketing so Important for the Success of Businesses

A 2021 Smart Insight report states that email marketing was the most effective digital marketing strategy because of its hardcore personalization tactics. Despite being the oldest digital communication tool on the block, it continues to maintain its significance in the domain of marketing alongside social media networks and live chats. So, what is email marketing, and how has it remained a necessity in the age of algorithm-driven marketing strategies? Let’s find out! 

How Does Email Marketing Work

Email marketing influences customers intuitively. These are the basic elements of an effective email marketing campaign:

Step 1: Choose an Email Marketing Tool

Email marketing tools make campaigns more intuitive and automated. Apart from keeping tabs on leads and customer segments, they monitor and retarget audiences based on their position in the sales funnel.

Step 2: Build an Email List

Comprehensive email lists are databases of people who have manually subscribed to receive your emails. They are valuable company assets of current and prospective customers.

Step 3: Create an Email Marketing Strategy

Email marketing strategies help you focus on specific email marketing platforms, select monthly campaigns, and design strategies according to email lists or market demographics.

Step 4: Automate the Essentials

Email marketing tools group subscribers based on their previous email responses and website activity. Common automated emails include welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, and suggestive product upsell emails.

Step 5: Set a Specific Goal for a Campaign

Emails help you achieve the following goals: increase brand awareness, boost sales, nurture new leads and retain older ones, and maintain consistent customer engagement.

Step 6: Monitor Campaign Performance

Campaign monitoring tools check every detail that enables high user engagement, such as subject title length, mail-sending frequency, attaching appropriate lead magnets, etc.

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Fundamentals of Email Marketing

To fully grasp what email marketing’s endgame is, let’s cover its fundamentals:

1. Personalization is Key

The audience will subscribe and retain their membership when they find the humanistic aspect behind a brand. Speaking directly to users and personalizing automated emails is central to marketing success.

2. Engaging Without Misleading

Use engaging titles to increase email open rates but keep them within the context. Flowery headlines have a chance to mislead readers, thus impacting trust.

3. Maintaining a Crisp Tone

Email messages are short. Concise content with summarized touchpoints marks the purpose of an email.

4. Clear Call to Action (CTA)

A call to action, or CTA, is the decision you want your audience to make through email. Its hyperlinks, tone, and language should always point toward a specific purpose.

5. Consent is Absolute

Sending uninvited emails defies regulatory compliances and also interrupts users with interactions they aren’t mentally prepared for. Permitted communication boosts return on investment (ROI) by enabling consensual and quality engagement.

Why Email Marketing is Important

What is email marketing’s impact on your consumer base, and what characteristics hold its importance?

• 50% of the online population uses emails; it’s the most accessible medium of communication 
• A Pitney Bowed study claims 98% of Americans have active email accounts, and four out of 10 people look forward to new emails
• Email lists reflect your company’s latent customer base 
• Direct communication and maximum personalization combine to ensure marketing success
• Success rates and extensive profitability of email campaigns drive their high ROI 
• Emails always have a default tone of seriousness that provides higher engagement than other forms of advertising

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Types of Email Marketing

There are different types of emails that companies send out, depending on the advertising contexts and timelines. The best ways to reach out to the audience include the following:

1. Promotional Emails

Marketing campaigns involve promotional emails to declare product launches, special offers, new brand releases, and so on. They come with very specific CTAs, such as completing a purchase on a discounted coupon. Their frequency varies according to the changing marketing rhythm of buying trends. For instance, a Black Friday sale will demand three promotional emails on a single day.

2. Informational Emails

What is email marketing when it comes to sharing information? There are specific types for that too, and they come in the form of informational emails—newsletters, and announcements.

Newsletters add value to the customer base with direct interaction on topics that interest your subscribers. Some companies focus more on personalization than on the content of newsletters. 

On the other hand, major company changes, product launches, emergency logistical crises, and communication errors are best declared through announcement emails.

3. Re-Engagement Emails

Marketing emails can also re-engage with potential customers who didn’t have a pleasant experience with the website or haven’t been active lately.

Pros and Cons of Email Marketing Campaigns

Pros

• When subscribers provide active consent for you as a guest in their inbox, it increases the follow-up chances of sales compared to interrupting ads
• Every email has a specific objective, allowing you to achieve more control over the medium
• With prescient market analytics and consumer research, one-on-one mails promise hyper-personalized campaigns
• With the strategic use of email marketing tools, you can optimize marketing resources without compromising on quality

Cons

• Without a great strategy, the chances of marketing emails remaining unread until their lifetime is high
• It is difficult to build a steady base of subscribers as major email services use spam filters for frequently unopened emails
• Standing out with your emails amid a lot of compliance rules and competition can be quite challenging

How to do Email Marketing

Understanding what email marketing’s role in optimizing ad campaigns requires a holistic approach to the process. Here’s how you can write remarkable emails:

Step 1: Audience Segmentation

Sift through the existing mailing lists to identify active consumers, regular website viewers, and inactive users, and formulate hyper-targeted email copies accordingly.

Step 2: Subject Line

A perfect email subject line has the following elements: clear statement of intent, personalizing, solution-driven, subject-specific keywords, and active voice.

Step 3: Focus on the Preview Text

Preview texts are a pitch for your marketing message. Try to make it as engaging, crisp, and personal as possible so that it reinforces your brand value.

Step 4: Lucid Read and Storytelling

Bullet points, short sentences, and the storytelling model of ‘attention-desire-action’ best draw customer interests.

Step 5: Psychological Triggers

Psychological triggers such as warnings about missing out on offers are crucial for email campaigns because even under the same market segment, different individuals respond differently.

How to Build an Email Marketing List

Let’s find out what is the email marketing list’s significance and how to build it from scratch:

1. A strong purpose: Ensure you have a clearly defined reason to ask for email addresses. Free downloadable assets, relevant product updates, and contest participation are some of the tricks that marketers use to lure subscribers. 
2. Consistent, personalized content: Email marketing increases your follower base with personalized content, a strong CTA, and follow-up tactics.
3. Strategic emails: Setting up introductory emails, knowing the correct time to pitch for sales, etc, will help you better navigate customer interests.
4. Having a long list increases your costs: It is important to fill up the lists with quality contacts and improve the efficiency of campaigns, ensuring a curtail of marketing costs.

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Is Email Marketing Outdated?

A 2022 LinkedIn report states that even in the age of the metaverse, the number of email users across the globe exceeds the social media population by at least 13%. This mammoth consumer base adds to email’s defining features, such as transparency and user access. Moreover, email marketing outperforms social media in terms of ROI, adaptability, and user engagement. 

Leverage Your Email Marketing Knowledge on Emeritus

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By Bishwadeep Mitra

Write to us at content@emeritus.org