As alternative methods of digital marketing emerged over the last 5-10 years, email marketing has slowly been pushed down the pecking order when it comes to prioritising the best marketing options for a business. However, email marketing can be a fantastic avenue for any business, for four main reasons. With a small investment of time and money, you could make an email marketing campaign that is a great success for your business.
Can Build Trust With Targeted Content
One of the biggest benefits of a consistent email marketing campaign is that you can easily build trust by creating targeted content for your customers. When you are deciding what you are going to send out to your email list of customers, split the list into different demographics or groups and create different campaigns for them.
You may have a more general campaign that goes out to all customers, but you should also be offering targeted content, as this will enable customers to trust that you understand them and their wants/needs. For example, a sports shop may have a wide range of different demographics who shop with them, so sending out general information may not be the most effective method of engaging customers. Instead, you could split your customers into categories, including those who buy cricket equipment, those who buy football equipment and those who buy running equipment.
Then, you can create specific campaigns directed at the different types of consumer. You might create an email about the best ways to fuel your body as a cricketer, the best drills to keep you in good shape as a footballer or tips for building up to a 10k run as a beginner. Within this email, you could send discount codes on the specific area they are interested in. Whilst for some businesses targeted people by their age might be better, don’t be afraid to get creative and show your customers that you are listening and want to provide useful information.
When you are sending relevant and interesting information to specific groups, customers are likely to respond well and trust your company more. Email marketing is a fantastic way to send out this tailored content.
It Is Extremely Cost Effective
Email marketing is also extremely cost effective compared to other methods of marketing. The cost of creating the emails and distributing them to customers is very cheap and you know the content is being sent out to relevant and qualified users. As you can split up your marketing list, you know that the people receiving the content are already interested in what you have to say as they have signed up to your email list.
As opposed to other avenues such as PPC, retargeting or social adverts, the cost of sending out emails to your customers is zero. Additionally, you can easily create the emails in-house, so your overheads will be minimal. Email marketing can cost as little as you need it to, making it a fantastic fit for any business.
You could work with external companies who specialise in email marketing, or a design agency Manchester or London based to create a campaign that truly reflects your brand, both visually as well as through the content. This isn’t essential, however as your business grows, this is an area you might want to invest in as it can be so effective when done properly.
It Brings Traffic To Your Website
One of the most simple benefits of email marketing is that it brings traffic to your website. In the emails you sent out, you should include some sort of call to action to encourage people to click through from the email to the website. This might be offering a discount code with a button below saying ‘Shop Our New Collection’, which encourages the receiver to take action.
Although the click through rate for email marketing is only 2.5%, they will be qualified to place an order or make an enquiry. It can take time to understand what your customers are looking for and what makes them click through to the website, yet once you have, you will reap the benefits. For most customers, the biggest issue when it comes to email marketing is receiving too many emails. Try to limit the amount of emails you send out to once a week, and even longer in some industries.
You Can Collect Valuable User Feedback
Email marketing is a brilliant method of collecting valuable user feedback. If you have a particular area of your business that you are wanting to improve, or you simply want to receive some general feedback from your customers, it is best to send out an email to them all. Make sure that you have a catchy subject line to ensure they maintain interest, as something like ‘Customer Feedback’ is very boring and won’t give the customer an incentive to provide the feedback.
Instead, you would have a subject like “15% Discount Code? Yes Please…”. Then, in the email, you would say that by completing the short customer feedback survey, they would receive a 15% discount code off their next purchase. Make sure that this email is nice and brief and the essential information is at the very top of the email, otherwise you risk people losing interest. You are gaining relevant feedback from engaged customers, which is exactly what you should be looking for.
Final Thoughts
Although there are mixed opinions about email marketing, these benefits speak for themselves. It is a fantastic way of building trust through targeted content, which is difficult to achieve through other avenues. It is far more cost effective than other methods and it is a simple way to bring qualified traffic to your website. Finally, it can be extremely useful to utilise in order to collect valuable user feedback to improve your business. When you are rethinking your marketing campaign, make sure to consider email, as it is an efficient and accessible avenue for many businesses!