Why Email Marketing is a workhorse channel in your connected journey

Personally, I feel a little protective over email marketing, gradually I’ve been learning more about it over the last 8 years and my love for it grows.

We’ll share some facts and insights in this blog to back up why but for now let’s understand why email is a workhorse channel to help nurture, build relationships and ultimately increase conversion.

An opportunity to get creative

Emails can be incredibly rich from a creative point of view, with design to match your brand, movement and interactivity. Striking the balance between image and text is of course important but emails give you the opportunity to land your message with style.

210x cheaper than a second class stamp

The cost of sending an email averages around a third of a penny (£0.003) compared to a second class stamp which is now 65p. Need we say anymore?

So fast it’s almost exhilarating

Those of you that have used MailChimp will remember the sweaty finger pop up making you go back and check your email the 10th time saying ‘this is your moment of truth’. It’s true, once you’ve clicked send it won’t take long for those emails to start appearing directly in your customers' inbox which can be an exhilarating experience.

Bullseye

An email address can act as a customer view and hold lots of data against it to help make your communications more targeted. Starting from simple personal information to location and interactions with your brand. It’s a channel to help prove to your customers you know them.

So considering all of this and the facts we think email has legs yet:

• Email boasts an ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, up from $38 in 2018 

• 306 billion emails were sent in 2020 and by 2024 this is projected to rise to 361bn

• 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months 

So how do we make the most of email marketing?

Are you sending a batch and blast newsletter to a total subscribed database and wondering why engagement is decreasing?

We are all victims of setting the bar too high and then feeling disappointed when a plan doesn’t go quite as we wanted. Our advice would be to start simple. Here are a few simple ways to increase the effectiveness of email:

Mapping email within your customer journey

Planning email data capture into your wider search marketing is critical to helping take the user through the marketing funnel.

Using marketing such as SEO and PPC we are driving users to the website. Depending on the user intent, there will be different anticipated outcomes and for those visits earlier on in their sales journey we would highly recommend offering the user something valuable that can be exchanged for an email address. This could be a downloadable guide for example, but in doing so we can then capture the user and can then use email marketing  to begin building a relationship with the user and nurturing them through the sales funnel.

Once we have this information we can then start to connect the dots and build the customer relationship.

Being targeted and relevant in its simplest form

Put yourself in the customer's shoes, of course their interest in you and your products peak when they interact with you not the other way around, almost all email marketing platforms now offer automation. Allowing you to trigger emails based on interactions with your customers.

The easiest way to get this started is to be in context and strike whilst the iron is hot. A few basic emails to get started are welcome series, first product purchase or cart abandonment. It is said that automated emails average 152% higher click-through rate than “business as usual” emails.

Perfecting personalisation

Sounds daunting doesn’t it? The reality is that it is very hard to achieve 1:1 personalisation for the majority of business. Starting with a recency (when did they last interact?), frequency (How often do they interact?) and monetary (How much are they worth to your business?) segmentation can propel your personalisation efforts overnight and soon you’ll have a better view of engagement. Again, most marketing platforms have the ability to create segments on these variables and some have them preset like MailChimp. 70% of Millennials are frustrated with brands sending irrelevant emails. So even more reason to set up some basic segmentation.

Test, test, test

I can’t emphasise enough the power of a simple A/B test, it’s said that 39% of brands don’t test emails. Imagine having the opportunity to go back in time and send your email again with a change that improves conversion rate. When you test, you are optimising in real-time, making the most of your communication and audience.

Not only that but these learnings can be used across the business and other channels. Start simple with a subject line test, after all getting people to open emails is the first and most important hurdle to overcome.
A/B testing comes as standard or as an upgrade in most email marketing platforms and can help to make sure your test is statistically relevant too.

Be genuinely interested in your customers

This is more important now than ever before, consumer behaviour has changed and businesses need to be more human to get engagement. In the book ‘How to win friends and influence people’ by Dale Carnegie he wrote

"You make more friends in two months by becoming genuinely interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you."

Too many times we see email being used as a promotional sales channel, 50% off everything, last chance to secure that product you’ve never wanted. Email can and should be a great channel to build relationships with your customer and nurture them, so consider what’s in it for them when reading your email.