Deciding where, when, and how to deploy your marketing budget can be frustrating and intimidating at the same time. Once you’re at the point where you’re looking to scale most marketing agencies will start recommending paid ads. But if attracting new customers isn’t your primary concern, email marketing might be a better fit for you.
Email marketing allows you to capture traffic that’ll otherwise leave your site, traffic that commonly doesn’t come back. It also allows you to market to existing customers (if they’ve opted in) – and what’s better than marketing to someone who has already purchased you’re product/service AND wants to hear from you again? This allows you to stretch your marketing dollars further than you could imagine. Email marketing can also be used to drive sales or even point users to new content on your website, helping improve brand awareness, and potential rankings, in the process. But before jumping into the world of email marketing it’s crucial to understand email marketing basics.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that allows you to directly communicate with the customers on your email list. Quickly allowing you to share your business’s products, services, helpful blog content, new sales you may be running, remind people if they left something in their cart, and so much more. All of which can improve your customer loyalty while boosting brand awareness.
The Benefits Of Email Marketing
Email marketing has been around for decades, and for good reason. Email is one of the most effective, and affordable, ways a company can grow and interact with an audience. Unlike social media, the vast majority of people will only join your email list if they have some level of interest in what you are offering. And with that, let’s go over the 8 main benefits of email marketing your business may be missing out on.
1) Stay In Contact With Your Audience
When nearly 95% of traffic to your website doesn’t come back, it can be hard to stay in touch with visitors who haven’t made that jump to becoming one of your customers. Email also offers you a direct path to your audience’s inbox, allowing you to share helpful information like tips, tricks, additional product uses, events you’re hosting, sales, or even new blog content they might find helpful.
2) Reach Customers In Real-Time
As mobile devices become more and more common your customers are increasingly more likely to open any emails you send to them on the same day. Providing you and your business an opportunity to reach out to people the moment you have something to share, whether it’s offering a new product or service, or even running a sale.
The real-time nature of email marketing also allows you to quickly share new sales and discounts your customers may not have seen yet. This quickly allows you to drive traffic to sales pages, improving your company’s bottom line.
3) Increase Brand Awareness
As more companies transition to the digital space, whether that’s on Google or social media websites like Facebook, Youtube, or Twitter, brand awareness can quickly snowball into a big deal. The best thing about email is someone will only give you their email address if they have some level of interest in your business. Giving you a golden opportunity to increase that interest through a polite greeting and helpful information. Improving both brand awareness and your bottom line.
4) Drive Traffic To New Content Or Products
Helpful content is one of the largest contributing factors to a website’s growth and brand awareness. And one of the best ways to quickly drive traffic to new content or products on your website is through email marketing. Email allows you to drive traffic to a new page in hours, instead of weeks or even months, and can even nudge Google to index and rank that content faster.
5) Drive Repeat Sales & Increase Brand Loyalty
Repeat sales are easier to achieve when you have an audience that’s loyal to your brand. While a large part of that equation is having an excellent product or service, it also includes things like sending your customers additional information about a recent purchase or scheduling follow-up emails to make sure they’re happy and are getting the most out of their purchase.
You can even set up an automated “win back” email that sends to customers after a certain period of time if they have not made a follow up purchase. This can simply be an awareness based email to bring you back to top of mind, but often includes some sort of discount to help entice the repeat purchase.
6) Email Offers You Targeted Messaging
There are several different phases your audience will transition through on their journey to become new customers. Most of them boil down to whether they’re a hot, cold, or warm lead. Hot leads are exponentially more likely to convert to a sale, while warm leads need a little more time to get to know you. Where cold traffic isn’t familiar with your business at all and is the least likely to convert.
It’s important you tailor your approach to match the individual phase your audience is in. And email marketing can provide you with the tools to segment your audience into different groups. Providing your business with a means of targeting your audience with different messages, based on where they are in the buying journey.
7) You Can Use Automation To Save Time
All the benefits we’ve listed for email marketing above haven’t touched on email marketing’s most powerful aspect, automation. Popular email marketing tools like Mailchimp and Activecampaign allow your business to streamline and automate all of your email marketing efforts into one, or multiple, funnels. Effectively putting your company’s email follow-ups on autopilot once they’re built out.
8) Easy To Maintain And Inexpensive
Unlike paid advertising, email marketing is a fixed monthly cost based on your list’s size. The exact prices vary from tool to tool but they’re all easy to maintain and shockingly affordable. Especially when you compare their potential ROI to other marketing efforts.
5 Popular Types of Email Marketing Campaigns
While this isn’t a complete list, it is enough to show you how powerful email marketing is as a marketing tool.
Welcome Messages
First impressions are everything, for individuals and businesses alike, and that saying is especially true when it comes to email marketing. The first step every business takes when getting into email marketing is crafting a welcome message.
This welcome email is a golden opportunity to introduce themselves and explain some of the benefits new subscribers can look forward to, dramatically increasing the likelihood of new subscribers opening that company’s next email instead of leaving and reporting them as spam.
Newsletters
Newsletters are a powerful and effective way for businesses to share information with their audience. That information could be a new blog post they just published, industry-specific news, or even important announcements. All of which improve brand awareness and help your company build trust with your audience.
Post Purchase Followup
Every company, large or small, thrives on feedback and reviews. And one of the best ways to get both is through follow-up emails. Sending a recent customer a quick survey going over their shopping experience and asking them for honest feedback is a fantastic way for you to figure out what you’re doing well, and any areas you could improve.
Those serveys can even provide valuable insight into potential pain points. Helping you find broken or incomplete parts of your sales funnel that your customers are getting caught on. Giving you additional information that you can then turn around and use to further optimize your sales process. These post-purchase follow-up emails also show your company values customer feedback, increasing the likelihood of a positive review and repeat sales.
Limited Time Offers
A quick email on limited-time offers is a popular and effective use of email marketing. The last thing you want to do is run a weekend sale just to realize nobody knew about it. Sending a quick message to your email list is sometimes all it takes to start driving sales.
Abandoned Cart Emails
Every company that sells something online will inevitably run into issues with potential customers abandoning their cart. And with an average of 69.82% of users abandoning their digital shopping carts, it’s a far bigger problem than you might think.
A quick, easy, and effective way to nudge and remind those customers they left something in their cart is with an email. With how busy life is nowadays, a simple reminder goes a long way.
Email Marketing Can Work For Any Business
Email marketing is a powerful tool for any and every business. Whether you have a list of 50 subscribers or 500,000 subscribers, the people on that list have an interest in hearing back from your company. And the best part is you have direct access to them. No waiting around for a new post on social media to get traction, email marketing is direct and instant.
Conclusion: Why Email Marketing Is Important
Email marketing is a powerful tool any business can leverage for both short-term and long-term success. But, just because you have an email tool and have started growing a list doesn’t mean you are guaranteed success. Email marketing, like other forms of marketing and advertising, takes steady work to build and maintain. If you are struggling to leverage an email list, or aren’t sure where to start, reach out and see what Diffuse Digital Marketing can do for you!