Email marketing doesn’t have the best reputation. From marketing spam to ‘Nigerian Princes’ – it’s all become a bit messy. It also doesn’t help when you receive weekly emails from a business showcasing their new bikes for sale even though you bought one from them only two months earlier. It’s for these reasons why eMarketing has been given a bad rap and understandably caused people to switch off.
That doesn’t mean eMarketing doesn’t work though – it’s all about how you do it. Research has found 72% of people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media, and email campaigns generate six times more click-throughs than from a tweet. Clearly, eMarketing is still relevant and a great marketing option if used right. Here are a few basic questions to help improve your current eMarketing campaigns:
- Is your data up to date
- Does your data contain fields to segment by (Prospect, Customer, Industry)?
- Are your mailing lists segmented?
- Do your messages differ depending on which segment is being targeted?
- Does your email template look professional and represent your brand?
- Do your emails offer a call-to-action? E.g. ‘Read more’ or ‘Click for a free download’.
- Are your emails consistent in their messaging and frequency?
You should have answered yes to all of those questions. If you didn’t, you might want to revisit your campaign to give yourself the best return on investment and your customers the most relevant information. Simply personalising emails improves click-through rates by an average of 14% and conversations by 10%, making it a great first step you could take.
EMarketing isn’t just a way to market and promote your products or services, it’s a tool to generate sales, build relationships and loyalty. EMarketing is relatively inexpensive, has excellent customer reach and provides a great ROI.