There are plenty of people out there who are under the assumption that email marketing doesn’t work anymore, and you may be one of them. Most people believe that email doesn’t have the potential to reach and convert a target audience into customers, which couldn’t be further from the truth.
It absolutely works, and if you’re not taking advantage of email marketing, then you’re missing out on a great deal of new customers and additional revenue that you could be bringing into your business by using it. By the end of this article, you’ll have a much different idea of how email marketing works and whether or not it is effective.
Because Email Isn’t Dead
The first reason we have to bring up is the fact that email, in itself, is still very much alive and well. People use email for all kinds of purposes, just about everything. It’s actually been so thoroughly integrated into our daily lives through the various services, products, and apps that we use, not to mention the standard functions of email that have always been there, like bills and correspondence for work, that many of us probably don’t even realize how much we’re using email every day.
Just take the example of services that we use for… whatever. Notifications for just about every service are provided to their customers by way of email notifications, reminders, order and account updates, and a variety of other purposes.
Everyone Uses Email at Work
Professionally, in our jobs, email is still a preferred method of communication for staying in touch with the people you work with, as well as customers. Think about all the occasions when you use email to communicate with your boss, with your partners and colleagues, and anyone else, really, with whom you’re interacting professionally.
Moreover, outside of real, in-person meetings, email is typically the go-to method of communicating with colleagues at work, whether in the form of person-to-person, individual email conversations, or group email conversations for teams to stay in contact about projects. Email has even grown more popular over the past few decades, as an ever-increasing number of users have started using the Internet, so much so that a new email client seems to come out every couple of months.
There are, in fact, many email clients available beyond just the ones we all know like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo Mail, and there are new providers popping up all of the time. When you see how often we use email, it starts to become clear why it is so effective when used as a marketing tool.
Consider All the Email Marketing Services that Exist
It should be all the proof you need of how useful it is when you simply take stock of how many different email marketing services available to you, which you can find online. To name just a few of them: Constant Contact, MailChimp, SendInBlue, GetResponse, and AWeber are all leading email marketing services, any one of which are worth the money and have scores of clients who have discovered how useful this method of marketing really is.
It’s basic logic; if email marketing wasn’t viable anymore, then there wouldn’t be so many companies that are profiting from providing the service for businesses.
They Are in Business to Make Email Marketing Easier
They make it their goal to help you to be successful at email marketing and will be happy to show you all of the elements that need to come together to make it work. Within one of these online platforms, you’ll find all kinds of useful tools at your disposal, right there in your control panel, such as time and duration parameters, a variety of design templates, and formatting tools to give your marketing emails just the right look and feel.
We have found MailChimp to be one of the best and easiest-to-use services out there, and Constant Contact is also a good option if you decide to look into trying it. Go ahead and do a quick Google search for, “email marketing”, and you’ll see just how much demand there is for the service.
You’ll also find a ton of content online that talks about it and offers valuable teaching and instruction for how to do well with it. That’s not to say that there is a whole lot to learn when you’re getting started, but you can find endless tips and tricks to help yourself become more successful with your email marketing campaigns.
Email Cuts Out the Clutter
One of the reasons that email marketing works so well is because it gives people a focused, uncluttered piece of advertising or promotion for your company. You are entirely in control of what the receiver is going to see when they open one of your emails, so their attention will stay on the content you’re giving them, instead of a bunch of Internet noise.
Not for nothing, this is actually an important aspect that you want to get right when you begin to use email marketing. That is, you need to design the pages that you are sending through email which contain your marketing or advertising materials in such a way that it appeals to the person receiving it and doesn’t turn them off in any way.
The subject line of your marketing emails is actually one of the key elements of your strategy, as it makes the difference of someone clicking on and reading your emails, or clicking away. You can really create the perfect experience for the receiver, composed exactly how you want it, to control the environment of the content you’re sending people through email, while of course controlling the actual content so that it is unadulterated for the reader.
Kill the Noise and Show People What You Want Them to See
There is a staggering amount of noise in channels like social media, where the person whom you’re targeting is subject to a bombardment of content from a ton of other companies, friends, and organizations who are all trying to grab your customer’s attention at the same time.
Though social media marketing is valuable and definitely has its place, using that channel means you’re going to be forced to contend with all that noise. There is, of course, a very specific strategy for making social media marketing effective for your business, and being such a crowded space for marketers now, it’s tough to use it now for a small business.
Truthfully, unless you’re very experienced with using the social channels, the best way to put it to work for your business is as a supplemental to your primary marketing channels. Email marketing is far easier to understand and to make it work for you pretty quickly. When someone opens an email from your company, they get a clear page that contains only the material you want them to see, and nothing else.
They’re More Likely to See It
First of all, if you’ve already done business with the person, which you likely have done because we tend to get email addresses from people when they use our product or service, then they are more likely to open it because they probably remember who you are and feel that it could be something they need to see.
This is a great example of a good application for email marketing because everybody responds more positively, even if it’s only a bit more positively, to materials that come from an individual or organization they know, rather than someone “cold-calling” them, so to speak.
That’s also why it’s a good practice to try to maintain a continuity between your company and the customer to whom you are marketing something. What is basically meant by this is that when someone from your company reaches out through email to a customer, you should try, to the best of your ability, to make sure the same person is contacting them every time.
It’s obviously not always feasible as you gain a greater and greater volume of customers, but do your best because it can be very favorable to customers when you are able to maintain that level of consistency.
An Easy Way to Target Your Market
As we’ve already mentioned, people interact with their email quite a bit because they are using email every day for all kinds of things, so they are probably going to at least see the subject line of your marketing email when you send something out to them.
Aside from writing the perfect subject line, though, the content of your emails needs to be composed based on knowledge of what your customers are looking for. One of the hardest things to accomplish with marketing of any kind is to get the material in front of the right people, and enough of the right people.
So, one of the greatest advantages you have when using this marketing method is that, when you get an email address from people in your target group, you probably got that address because they are your potential customers, whether from a lead-generating tool or from your own existing customers, or from another source. Lead-generating tools are another great resource you can use to grow your business, which you can learn more about in our post on the subject, here:
https://talkroute.com/lead411-business-sales-leads/
Email Marketing is Inexpensive
One thing that should possibly be at the top of this list is that email marketing doesn’t cost nearly as much as other marketing methods. You’ll probably spend a few bucks per month on the subscription you pay for with an email marketing service like MailChimp, but it pales in comparison to the high costs you’ll generate with PPC ads, retargeting ads, billboards, and the like.
You can actually even do email marketing on your own, without using the outside service to prepare and send the emails for you; however, for the time you’ll have to invest, especially as a sole proprietor, the cost of that time can tend to overwhelm your ROI pretty quickly.
That’s exactly why the services that do it for you are so valuable when using this marketing medium. In a basic sense, email is almost completely free by itself; or rather, the additional emails you send from your business’ email client probably won’t cost you any extra money.
If you’re a small business with a fairly low goal of the number of people you want to reach, most email marketing services will offer you some great deals for introductory packages, and even as you grow and increase your reach goal, the cost doesn’t go up that much. It’s just one of the easiest ways to market your business, with some of the highest ROI of any method.
Work Smart, Not Hard
Email is the smart method of marketing. Once you do sign up with one of the services such as MailChimp, to run a campaign for you, you’ll find that the time it takes out of your day to manage it is extremely low. After you come up with the template, design, and content for your email pages, all you have to do then is to plug in all the email addresses to which you want to send your content and let the service you’ve chosen do the rest for you.
It will be completely automated once you have all the content and addresses put into it, which you can set to send at certain times and days of the week. This is probably the most helpful feature of those services, as you don’t have to send any of them out yourself.
Even if you were to use copy and paste, with mass email features within your email client, it would still be very time-consuming and end up driving you nuts in the process. Why would you want to spend all that time, needlessly, when you can pay a small monthly fee for a service that will do it for you and never even think about it?
Check out all of the articles in the ‘Email Marketing’ series:
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.