Email marketing has been discussed so many times that there’s barely much more to say… or is there?
It would appear that albeit the majority of tips dealing with the importance of segmentation, personalization and mobile user focus either falls on deaf ears or is otherwise being ignored.
Take your inbox as an example. Even though every brand resorts to email marketing in hopes of boosting their ROI, how many emails do you receive that feature subject lines that grab you by the heart or fail at spamming you?
Provided that you only subscribe to newsletters by brands whose offer actually interests you, the number of unimportant emails we all receive is stunning, given the fact that more or less all brands have easy access to common knowledge on email marketing.
It begs the question: why the heck do they keep doing it?
Psychology Matters!
First of all, we see far too often how common sense easily crumbles. Especially in the face of mass hysteria, such as is the one we are witnessing at this very moment.
Marketers are no exception to the rule. Rather than being ignorant, they often follow the wrong logic of assuming that since more than a half of the world’s adult population uses email services on a regular basis, random emails will eventually hit the mark.
As for the brands letting their subscribers down, this is commonly attributed to either greed or the absence of critical thinking.
Getting people to subscribe to your newsletter is just the first step. In order to keep your audience interested, you need to continually deliver on your business promise and keep your offer competitive and evergreen.
Email marketing is no different than any other form of advertising. It takes it ages to get people to trust a brand but mere seconds to destroy that trust.
Defining Audiences and Increasing Deliverability
Once you know that, you shouldn’t have difficulties concluding that you should direct all your marketing efforts to people interested in your brand.
To do that, you’ll need to define your audience(s) and fine-tune your campaigns, which is best done by using insights. Now, insights are a double-edged sword. They provide a myriad of information, but it is you and only you who decides how to best utilize it.
The first logical step is to use insights to learn customers’ names. Rule number one of every successful email campaign is – personalize your emails. Personalization begins with addressing people by their names.
To ensure that your emails will reach customers’ inboxes rather than their spam folders, make sure to choose a trusted email service provider and to avoid spam-trigger words (check out CAN-SPAM Act for guidelines).
The next thing to do would be to add an unsubscribe button to all messages you send. Remember that audiences change over time. To avoid your messages being flagged as spam, you only need to remind the recipient that unsubscription is just a click away.
Other factors to consider are handling IP address issues, authenticating your emails, tracking your email statistics, segmenting your messages, checking email deliverability with seed email accounts and making certain that your email service provider is not blacklisted. Also, never buy email lists!
How Efficient Is Email Marketing?
Quite efficient if premeditated, as it were. Although it is impossible to offer universal statistics due to the differences in industries and marketing strategies, what we know for certain is that the most successful of email campaigns are capable of generating ROIs of up to 4400%.
The visibility of emails is quite higher than that of, say, Facebook ads. The latter reach ca. 2% of people’s feedback. In addition, email campaigns are 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
The trick is in optimizing your campaigns for mobile users. For, make no mistake about that, the majority of emails are being accessed on mobile devices. Here are some stats to illustrate:
- 23% of people accessing emails on mobile devices read them at least one more time
- 70% of emails accessed on mobile devices are re-read
- 65% of the re-read messages result in a click
- One-third of all clicks are performed on mobile devices
- Subscriptions take place on mobile devices for the most part
As for email marketing statistics, some of the most important insights are:
- Targeted email campaigns generate over 75% of the total email revenue
- Transactional emails generate 6x more revenue than other email types
- Transactional emails get 8x more clicks than other email types
- Automated email campaigns have 50% conversion rates
- 77% of marketers use email to send personalized content to subscribers
- 67% of marketers use big data to personalize email campaigns
- 66% of marketers personalize email campaigns
- 64% of marketers use mobile-optimized designs for email campaigns
- 61% of consumers wish brands to contact them via email
- 30% of marketers say that email marketing generates the highest ROI
Conclusion
It would only seem logical to conclude that knowing your audience, keeping a consistent voice and sending only relevant offers (not too frequently!) is the key to boosting your email campaigns.
We’ll just add another obvious fact to the calculation: keep communication alive! Listen to customers’ feedback, re-adjust your offer to remain competitive and offer extra special deals to loyal customers. Nothing screams reliability louder than having customers’ back at all times!
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