by Most businesses invest time and money into email marketing efforts, according to a survey from The Manifest. Among the 500 digital marketers they surveyed, 69 percent reported that the business they worked with spent resources on email marketing.
Many of those businesses sent out marketing emails regularly. According to the survey, the top two reasons businesses used email marketing were for growing and retaining customers and increasing engagement among customers.
Those should be priorities for every business. Here's a closer look at why those businesses are using email to retain and engage customers - and you should, too.
Email marketing can be more effective than social media
On average, anywhere from 2-10 percent of your business's Facebook followers will see any given post you publish. Your more popular posts will have larger reaches, but most won't.
Facebook has designed the system this way to get you to spend money on boosting posts. There's nothing wrong with boosting posts, but when you're looking for a more cost-effective method over time, email marketing is the answer.
That's because as long as you avoid spam filters, your emails arrive in the inbox of everyone on your list. The more successful you are at providing quality email content that engages customers, the more email subscribers will open your messages and click any relevant links.
Email marketing retains customers and keeps them engaged
Brands build loyalty by frequently getting in front of and communicating with their customers. Thanks to its relatively low cost - and for many no cost at all - email marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach your customers directly through their inboxes.
Having this connection is invaluable for convincing customers to make new and repeat purchases or respond to to other calls to action, such as visiting your website. You will know whether the customers who receive your emails are staying engaged when those calls to action are achieving the results you want.
If you need help figuring out how to include a successful call to action in your emails, then we recommend reading this post from CrazyEgg.
To summarize that post:
- Keep your calls to action low risk, meaning you aren't asking for much (if anything) up front.
- Be clear about what it is you are asking customers to do.
- Highlight up front how they will benefit.
Build an email list to increases sales
If your clients or customers are already giving you their email addresses, then congratulations! You have put in the hard work of building an email list. It only makes sense to start a dedicated email marketing campaign or newsletter at this point.
If you haven't started asking customers or website visitors for their email addresses yet, then there is no better time than now to get started.
Building an email list can lead to increased sales. In the US, 81 percent of online shoppers make additional purchases online or in-store as a result of email marketing campaigns based on their preferences or recent purchases.
In today's digital age, having a customer give you their email address basically means they expect you to be contacting them via email at some point. According to a MarketingSherpa survey, 61 percent of customers said they like to receive promotional emails and 28 percent said they would like to receive those types of emails more frequently.
So what are you waiting for?
Here's how to grow your email list
There are many ways to grow your email list. Use a combination of these tactics and, over time, you will have a sizeable list.
First, let's cross off the easy strategies. Make sure you have an email list signup form on your website. Share links to the form on each of your social media platforms.
We have written before about ways to grow your email lists. You can hold contests where the entry form asks for an email address or offer incentives (such as discounts) in exchange for customers' email addresses.
Use at least a couple of these techniques to start growing your email list.
Engagement quality is better than quantity
Social media takes up a lot of the time companies devote to marketing. Make sure you carve out enough time to engage in email marketing, though.
Why? Think about it.
What do your social media feeds look like? Probably cluttered. How much time do you spend scrolling instead of interacting with a single piece of content? Even if you do interact with a post, how long does it take you to go back to scrolling? Probably not long.
Email has a much slower pace than social media. The distractions in a person's inbox aren't as intense as they are on a news feed.
This means you probably have a little more time with each customer who opens your email than you do the average customer who sees one of your business's posts on a social media platform.
Because of this, you should focus on providing quality engagement in your emails. You may send out multiple social media posts per day. With email, it's best for most businesses to aim for one or two times per week in a normal week.
Customers will begin to notice when you routinely send them quality emails that share deals, sales or product updates that interest them. They'll respect that. Soon, the amount of time they spend reading your emails and responding to your calls to action will increase.
Emagine can help grow and manage your email campaigns
Emagine is familiar with the power of email and what it can do for businesses. With email, quality content matters - and that's what we deliver.
Our team will put together regular email marketing campaigns that will help you retain your customers and keep them engaged with your business. We will sit down with you and your team so we can get to know your customers and determine the right campaign strategy that will achieve results.
Learn more about our approach to email marketing and the industry knowledge we will put to use for your business so that you can grow your customer base and keep your current customers coming back.
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