Why Email Marketing?
Traditionally, email marketing has been a very effective and efficient way to reach a large target audience. However, as with many aspects of digital marketing, its effectiveness is quickly changing as new technologies and trends emerge. With the growing distrust and distress caused by emails, your audience is growing less and less likely to read them.
However, there are plenty of reasons why email campaigns are still a great marketing solution. It can have a tremendous benefit to your business if done properly. Consider all the benefits of email marketing:
- A simple way to keep track of your audience
- Easily add new subscribers/members
- Ability to track how many people opened your email, clicked through, and shared it via social media, which is invaluable to improving your marketing strategy.
- Quick and easy way to inform your audience of company news, updates, sales, new blog posts or articles, etc.
- Relatively inexpensive
- Keeps you in the minds of your customers
- Can send out highly-targeted emails to certain people, such as newly added members or customized segments
- Encourages communication between client and company
- People can forward, print, save, and share your email with others more easily
- An infinite number of customers can be reached at once
- Drives traffic to your website or social media pages via links within newsletter
Email Marketing Today
Email marketing has worked extremely well in the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to work going forward. When designing an email marketing campaign you should consider how technology is changing and how that might hinder the effectiveness of your email campaign. Here are a few tips to keep in mind as you move forward with your email marketing campaign:
- Don’t send your email out at an impromptu time, i.e. 4 o’clock on a Friday or right before a holiday. You have a very high chance of no one reading it.
- Make sure the information in your email is relevant and interesting to your audience. If it has highly valuable information to the client, they are more likely to open and read it. A newsletter with noteworthy info is one example.
- Use a catchy subject line that doesn’t suggest spam or a sales pitch.
- Avoid extremely long emails.
- Make sure it doesn’t look like spam and uses proper grammar and spelling
- Be wary of over using exclamation points and trying to “sell” your company. Emails should inform, not just advertise.
- Don’t send emails too often. This will lead your audience to become annoyed and the chances are greater they will unsubscribe from your email list.
- Make sure users can unsubscribe easily from your email list if they choose to do so.
- Ensure your emails are configured for mobile devices. As more and more people rely on their mobile devices to check emails and share via social media, it’s critical that your email be readable from a mobile device.
Email marketing is changing. As inboxes get more and more crowded with useless and malicious emails, it’s important to give your subscribers something of value that is worth their time to read. While there is no doubt that email marketing is still a great solution for businesses, make sure to adapt your emailing style so that it is most effective. The ultimate goal is for your email to be opened and read, not just sent to the trash.