8 Reasons Why Email Marketing is Essential for Your Business
In today’s world, every product or service requires marketing to be sold in the market. If you want people to buy your product, it is necessary that they are aware of it. Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to create awareness among potential customers. It is professional, and most people of different age groups use an email platform, making it a powerful marketing tool. When a business intends to reach a wide range of potential customers, one strategy that it can use is an email marketing campaign. It basically involves sending an email to multiple recipients at once. The motive of such email campaigns is to make recipients take action, either to purchase a service or product or to learn more about a business. Let us understand in detail how email marketing benefits business growth.
- To increase brand awareness
- To create personalized content
- To generate traffic to a website
- To send timely campaigns
- To act as a forum for self-promotion
- To save time
- To measure campaigns’ success
- To retain customers
1. To increase brand awareness
When a business tries to increase its brand awareness, it can do so by being constantly visible to its potential customers. However, constant visibility is something that a company has to find the means to attain. One effective way to do this is to market itself to its customers. In this internet- and gadget-driven world, it has become even easier to reach potential customers through the right platform. Email is one such powerful tool that most users will certainly have an account for. Email’s wide prevalence makes it a powerful tool for businesses that want to reach out to their potential customers. After the initial reach-out, a business can improve its brand awareness by constantly reaching out to its customers with valuable content. A valuable piece of content is something that, initially, a few businesses would not have figured out, but with experience, they can identify their customers’ likes and dislikes. This lets a business share valuable pieces of content with its users through email marketing.
2. To create personalized content
Creating content for targeted users is a crucial factor in email marketing. It lets the company personalize its content as per the preferences of its users. When a company wants to target a specific set of audiences, it needs to create personalized content to their liking. Personalized content has a higher probability of being clicked on and checked out. It differs from traditional marketing in the sense that traditional marketing caters to common audiences, while personalized marketing focuses on people with specific interests. To paint a clear picture, a company that sells cricket bats should try to appear in the inboxes of cricket enthusiasts, not in any other inboxes. If it appears in cricket enthusiasts' inboxes, it has a higher chance of making sales. It triggers interest in the individual’s mind. Similarly, a minor factor that could influence a person to take action is addressing the person by name. When an email is personalized with the name of a recipient, a statistic shows that it has a higher chance of being clicked.
3. To generate traffic to your website
Even though the intention of an email campaign is to make sales, the indirect benefit is that a business increases its website traffic. When a business wants to reach out to its potential clients, it shares values in the form of content. However, those contents, in one way or another, have links redirecting to the company’s website. The link attached to an email helps potential buyers learn in detail about the products or services that the company offers. In addition to that, the number of people a business could reach is huge as well. As an email platform is mostly free, there is no limit to the number of people you can reach out to. Let’s say that you send out emails to 50,000 recipients. Even if 1% of them open and interact with your business, you will have received 500 visits to your website. It can improve the traffic on your website. However, there is one thing that you should add to receive traffic, which is a call-to-action button.
4. To send timely campaigns
Unlike traditional marketing campaigns, email marketing campaigns have some advantageous factors that distinguish them from their counterparts. One of the important factors is that they are not restricted by time or location. It can be set from anywhere at any time. This makes it one of the most effective ways for marketers to communicate. When a marketer wants to set up a campaign, the priority that he should give is mostly the target audience. Everything else, apart from the right target audiences, is secondary. When target audiences are set, it is crucial to define the time to reach out to those audiences, who are potential customers. It is also imperative to have as much detail as possible about the potential customer. This lets a business send out targeted campaigns, such as sending out festival offers and sometimes sending birthday offers to individuals on their birthdays. A business could create a deal or an offer that is planned to exist for a specific, short duration. All these could prove to be effective as they encourage people to take action.
5. To act as a forum for self-promotion
There is only one initial thing that a company has to do - collect the email addresses of its customers and potential customers. When email addresses are collected, it becomes easy for companies to contact their users with promotional offers. An advantageous factor in collecting email addresses is that customers have opted for it. It puts you in a position where you are not spamming a user’s inbox but promoting your brand through offers. It is beneficial for a business to promote itself through new product updates, features and benefits, and so on. In one way or another, the company can make itself regularly appear in front of its customers, either by sharing content related to industry updates, market updates, blog updates, or others. It directly registers in a potential customer’s mind. When he wants to take the action of purchasing a product in that category, he would preferably opt for the known brand. It puts the business in a position to stand out from its competitors. Here, a company gets business by constantly showcasing itself and increasing brand awareness among its customers.
6. To save time
Personalizing and automating emails could save a huge chunk of time for marketers. Automation is a process where emails are sent to targeted audiences that are members of a subscriber group. This can be done for a selected category of people whose addresses have already been collected. In doing so, these two factors can be integrated - personalizing and automating. It would be efficient in situations when a business has attracted a huge customer base. As sending out emails individually to each member of the group becomes next to impossible, automating them could prove to be efficient. It saves a lot of time for the business, but not all emails can be automated. There are certain emails that have to be sent individually. It depends on the situation and purpose behind the email. An additional advantage of this is that it lets a person reach out to many people at once. Here, it saves the burden of reaching out to each and every member of the subscriber base individually, which, in turn, saves a lot of time for a business.
7. To measure campaigns’ success
In general, a campaign is run to reach targeted audiences and promote a product or service. The ultimate expected result is for a user to take action. However, there are factors that need consideration to perform better in the future. When a person sets up an email campaign, there are a few things that would work and a few that would not. Hence, it is crucial to figure out the performance and improve it in the upcoming campaigns. There are many tools that help in figuring out the performance of a campaign. With such tools, a marketer would be able to analyze factors such as delivery rate, bounce rate, click-through rate, open rate, and so on. The data obtained from that could influence the next email marketing campaign that a business sets up. Let’s suppose a campaign performed well on a mobile device but didn’t perform well on a desktop. This shows that the campaign was optimized properly for a mobile phone but not so well for a desktop. With insights such as this, a campaign can be improved to perform well next time.
8. To retain customers
Major factors in retaining customers are customer experience and customer service. When a customer has the best experience with what you offer, it is highly probable that he will remain a customer. Additionally, customer service is another factor that a company should focus on. The sales funnel does not end with selling a product; it has more to do after the sale. In fact, a company has to focus on post-sale strategies. It can include strategies like following up with a customer after the sale and identifying their satisfaction through email campaigns. To add to it, it can also create re-engagement campaigns where they target existing customers who are unaware of new releases. When a company does all these things, it builds its credibility. However, in sharing the content while re-targeting to retain it, it is essential that the company add value to its content. In certain other situations, the company can follow up with existing customers and get their feedback about the products and services. This, in turn, can be used to improve the quality or performance of a service or product that the company sells.
Sum up
Though there are mixed opinions about the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, their advantages cannot be neglected. However, when a company intends to do email marketing, it is essential that it have a clear picture of what it wants out of it. In addition, it needs to have a little bit of patience and consistency in its practices. When a company follows the right email marketing practices, it reaps the above-mentioned benefits and more.
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