The Importance of Email Marketing

If you’re not using email to market to your customers, you’re doing it wrong. One of the most common uses of our digital marketing time at WDL is email marketing, and, as a tool, it’s arguable that email is the among the most measurable and achievable techniques at any company’s disposal. As a consumer, we all know that from time to time, email newsletters can get annoying, and so from a professional perspective we should all be duty bound to veer away from producing dull, benign and boring email content. The key thing though, is that you should be producing email content in the first place.

The internet provides a big wide world of possibilities for any organisation, and the primary marketing struggle is knowing how and when to best hit your target audience. With four out of five UK adults having access to a smartphone (a figure equivalent to 37 million people), it makes absolute sense to try target consumers where they spend most of their time looking, down. But not only that, figures state that 82% of users actually open emails from companies (Litmus), suggesting that the interest is real, and that 44% of those people went on to make at least one purchase in 2015. It’s also worth understanding that email is a privilege, not a right. Emails are opportunities to talk to your customer on their wavelength, to show that you understand them, their interests, their needs, and, more specifically, what they’re looking for from you.

Strength in Communication

Think of email not just as a way to communicate a message, but as an opportunity to begin a relationship, even if you’re speaking to previously existing customers. Having a steady stream of outgoing emails to your customers is an opportunity to keep your products and ideologies fresh in their mind, but also to encourage discourse that benefits both you and your customers in the long run. In an otherwise crowded market, email can help you find your audience, an audience you know is already interested in what you’re doing & is sat waiting for you to help them find what they’re looking for.

Measurable & Manageable

As I mentioned before, email is one of the most measurable marketing tools you can find. Any email marketing platform worth its weight should be able to provide data on the following metrics:

• Open Rates
• Click Through Rates
• Deliverability
• Subscriber Retention
• Content Engagement & Social Media actions

Using these tools can provide you with the foresight to develop and tweak your content in order to provide an ongoing stream of quality information & promotions. Learn what type of communication works better than others, and adapt. Starting from the ground up is going to take a lot of trial & error, but doing so will help you adapt other aspects of your customer communication to identify how people respond.

Low Cost, High Return

Comparatively, email is one of the lower cost marketing tools out there. Depending on the size of your subscriber list, emails can cost as little as 1p per contact, or some platforms offer unlimited use for a monthly fee.

The good news is that for as little as email marketing can cost, the return is often astronomic. Statistics suggest that for every 70p spent on sending a well designed, well worded promotional email, the average return is £25. Not to mention the number of leads that effective email marketing can generate, as well as the further conversions that it can open the door to. By delivering solid content over time you can continue to build up your email marketing reputation, as well as your overall subscriber list, meaning you can target more customers at once.

For business, it’s all about bottom line, and sending out promotional emails can have a huge effect on conversion numbers. On average, click through rates are up to 6x more effective through email marketing than they are through social media platforms. Users convert through emails, but the key thing is providing them with the opportunity and incentive to do so.