What is Email Marketing

A message in a electronic form is popularly known as ‘Email’. A personalised message or commercial message to a group of people by use of electronic form can be defined as ‘Email Marketing’. Most commonly through advertisements, requests for business, or sales or donation, any email communication is considered email marketing if it helps to build business, customer loyalty, trust, product, company or a brand. Email marketing is an effective and a efficient way to stay connected with your clients while also promoting business.

Why Email Marketing

With email marketing, one can easily and quickly reach target markets or industry without large investments on print space, television or radio air time or high production costs. A study by Direct Marketing Association has observed a $35 Return-on-investment for every $1 which is spent on Email Marketing and no other medium delivers this high on returns.

Here are few compelling reasons why email marketing is important and how they can help business:

1. Stay in contact
Emails have the ability to keep your customers informed.Consumers are capable of checking their email when it is convenient. It can give them a feeling that you are thinking of them. This email can be as simple as saying: “Hi, you’re on our mind, here is a special offer!” Those that have signed up to your email list have already made a commitment to receive these notes. So they will likely enjoy these emails and will boost engagement with your customers.

2. Reach customers in time
According to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This is very significant and should come into play when planning any marketing strategy. More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to access not only emails but all other types of media and information.

 

 

3. Preferred medium type
For a long time now, email has been a form of communication. As the years have gone by, email has fast become one of our main choices of communication. We have all been groomed to reply to an email in some fashion. Whether it is to reply, to forward, click through to something else embedded within the email, delete, or to buy something, or to sign up. We tend to do something with the email. Knowing this, you can use email to drive people to your website, to pick up the phone and call or any other call to action.

4. Email marketing is easily measurable
Email marketing tools or softwares offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, and open rates. This gives you a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working, which ones to tweak or which ones to get rid of altogether. These metrics should not be ignored. They are an important part of your internet marketing campaign as a whole.

5. Email marketing is affordable
Emails can reach a large number of consumers for less than pennies per message and the cost per conversion is so low with email marketing. Email marketing services such SendGrid, iContact, GetResponse, MailChimp, Pinpointe and SurveyGizmo are the email marketing software solutions suitable for various types of businesses. These email marketing software solutions also do offer larger monthly plans for growing businesses and high volume sender plans. They also offer subscription services for higher-volume senders. So, yes, while it does offer a significant ROI, it might be a wise idea to hire someone to manage these efforts.

6. Targeted messaging
One of important aspects that email marketing serves is lead nurturing. The main idea here is that potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Segmenting these customers into appropriate email marketing lists helps businesses target these groups more effectively. Customers need information to move them to the next buying cycle stage; pushing the right content can do just that.

7. It’s timely
One of the benefits of email marketing can be to sell your products, if approached in correct time and correct fashion. It’s important to use all the customer data and information you can. Sending customers a special offer on festivals, birthdays – customers are much more likely to purchase the deal.

8. Everyone Uses Email
A Hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email. That alone should be enough to convince you to explore the tool. Email is especially huge in the B2B world as it accounts for the most prominent form of communication.

 

Email Marketing Objectives

Email marketing is an indispensable tool for achieving the targets set out in your online email marketing campaigns. The use of email marketing requires the design and development of a clearly structured strategy. This includes the definition of concrete objectives that have to be reached with individual measures, such as mailers or newsletter, campaigns or transactional messages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Below are 6 critical objectives which can be achieved with email marketing:

1. Increase In Sales
Probably the most pursued objective in email marketing is to generate sales. Email marketing, however, can help to prepare a potential purchase by explaining the product.

2. New customer acquisition
When it comes to attracting or acquiring new customers, it is about making offers to customers / prospects that are still no clients of the company. But since email marketing is about permission marketing you can reach users who have already registered for your emailers or newsletter.

3. Brand and product awareness
Inform recipients of the availability of products or services that they may want or need and keep your brand image strong and consistent.

4. Brand recall
It means that the user remembers a trademark immediately just when the product category is mentioned, a high brand recall is needed and email marketing surely stand’s out here.

5. Customer Loyalty
Email marketing strengthens customer loyalty and helps in achieving long-term commitment from customer, seducing the person to regular purchases, and most importantly guaranteeing not to lose the customer to competitors by offering relevant offers that meet the customers’needs.

6. Customer Retention
There are a lot of reasons why email marketing drives retention. It’s more personal and direct than other marketing channels, and people love receiving email from their favorite brands. The type of emails work best for driving retention are such as Welcome Emails, Loyalty Emails, Post-Purchase Emails, Transactional Emails etc.

 

Email Marketing Challenges

Email marketing is a key to successful marketing and sales process, but there are numerous challenges to making the most of this critical marketing tool. As per MarketingSherpa’s email marketing benchmark study, the most important email marketing challenges were:
– Integrating email data with other data systems.
– Improving deliverability.
– Increasing Open Rates.
– Growing and retaining subscribers.
– Achieving measurable ROI.

Conclusion

It’s likely that there will always be new email marketing challenges just like any other marketing channel. But don’t give up because you can always overcome such problems by making the right moves and observing your performance. Email marketing is often an unbelievably powerful tool for curating, and keeping a loyal client base engaged with a clear impact.

Hope I did not miss that you wanted to know about Email Marketing – if yes, then please update in comments.