Think emails are old and outdated? Think again!
Everyone knows that social media is an essential part of expanding a business’s customer base. But there is much less conversation around the necessity of email marketing. Dismissing email marketing as a mere afterthought when devising your content strategy is a huge let-down for your business!
Here are the top three reasons email marketing is an essential part of content marketing.
A tool in promoting customer engagement
Emails allow you to connect with your target audience in a personal way. People who sign up to your emails do it voluntarily. They want to hear from you and feel connected to your business. Whether you’re announcing a sale, new product release or talking about a community initiative your company is engaged in, always remember that you’re writing to a customer who wants to feel connected to your brand. Email marketing campaigns allow you to nurture and build upon the initial interest of someone who’s just decided to sign up to your company newsletter.
Short on ideas for email marketing campaigns? Here are some suggestions:
• business milestones
• customer polls and feedback surveys
• sending customers special offers on their birthday
• seasonal sales
• blog posts about your business and why it’s important.
Above all, ensure your content is personal and one-of-a-kind. According to Hubspot, message personalisation is the top strategy that email marketers use to improve performance. Personalisation can be as simple as including a contact’s name in the email. Emails that include a contact’s name generate higher click-through rates than those that don’t. Balancing the number of emails your company sends is also essential. No one enjoys spam. But being left hanging is also no fun. Experiment and pay close attention to how your customers respond. Content strategy is ultimately about understanding customer needs and then crafting content in a way that speaks directly to those needs.
Email marketing campaigns are an agile, customer-orientated strategy. Customers can remain informed about your business on their terms because they can check their emails when it suits them.
Email marketing is also an effective strategy for targeting customers at different points of the buying cycle. Whether someone is still considering or in the ready-to-purchase stage, they need information to progress. With email marketing, you can craft you’re well-positioned to create content for any customer, no matter what stage of the buying cycle they’re in.
Marketers balance their time between attracting new customers and maintaining existing customers. This juggling act isn’t always easy, but email marketing helps here because it is easier to receive feedback from customers. One of the ways you can garner customer feedback is by creating customer satisfaction surveys. You can also share newsletters and announcements on social media to receive direct feedback on what type of content your customers want to see more of and what they’d rather see less. Email marketing is a great tool for bolstering customer engagement.
Easy to monitor success rates
Email marketing campaigns can have the highest return on investment for small businesses because they reach people on any device. Email marketing campaigns also make it possible for customers to make a purchase straight from their phone and/or laptop.
Most email marketing tools can also track what happens after you’ve sent an email campaign. This means you can easily track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, and click-through rates. With this information, you’ll understand what campaigns are working, what needs to be revised and what should be removed altogether. Email marketing tools illuminate what businesses can do to increase marketing strategy effectiveness.
Expand brand awareness
People generally prefer to engage with a business they know and trust. Email marketing allows you to build upon the credibility of your brand by sharing helpful, informative content with customers. When you build email marketing campaigns, you can customise the template with your logo and colours that match your brand’s aesthetic. This improves brand cohesiveness, making your company more recognisable for customers.
But brand recognition goes beyond design. You need to provide valuable content to customers if you want them to act on your company’s emails.
It’s a commonly held misconception that the act of checking emails is outdated. This could not be further from the truth! Email marketing is great for increasing brand awareness because no channel has a wider reach than email. Think about everything we do on the internet – whether it’s social media, government services or online shopping, every website requires us to enter our email address. Emails and online activity are inseparable. Emails are also the way people prefer to receive brand communications, with 99% of consumers reportedly checking their emails daily!
Of course, social media is a great tool for extending brand awareness. But this does not mean that you should neglect email marketing. Social media platforms fluctuate in popularity, while emails are a constant. This means that email marketing is one of the most reliable and trusted strategies for brand growth.
Email marketing campaigns allow businesses to:
- nurture leads
- connect with customers
- cultivate customer loyalty
- extend brand awareness
- acquire sales.
Ready to kick-start your email marketing strategy? Elite Words is well-positioned to assist. We create any type of content through any medium for any client! Contact us to find out how we can help businesses through our copywriting, copyediting and content strategy services.
