Mar 14, 2021 / Email

The importance of email marketing

Email marketing retained its position as one of the highest ROI forms of digital marketing in 2020. With the projected number of email accounts in the world due to top 4.48 billion by 2024, find out more about email marketing as we take a look at how it can help your business in 2021.

If we can take a lesson from 2020 and its impact on marketing, it would be how important it is for businesses to communicate directly with consumers. Whether it is to notify them about a new product or service, or an update on opening information, email marketing is an important tool to use when communicating with your audience.

Social media plays a part in business communications and with Facebook boasting over 2.7 billion users and Twitter 321 million users, you could be forgiven in thinking that this would be the primary source for speaking with consumers. But with an estimated 4 billion email users (Statista) – the potential of email is mind-blowing!

Why Email Marketing?

Email marketing communications can not only build trust between your business and its customers but can be a key tool to encourage loyalty to your brand. By creating a dialogue, it can be used to attract new and potential customers as well as communicate with existing consumers.

Customers that have registered to your email communications are already interested in your product making them a prime audience to engage with. Sending them more details or an offer can really help them to commit to a purchase. For example, 59% of people say that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions (Sale Cycle 2020).

Revenue

Email communications are a strategic way of talking directly to your customers, and when done correctly can dramatically improve your revenue. Email marketing’s ROI is 36:1 on average, down from 42:1 in 2019, a significant drop but still impressive numbers (Litmus). This shows just how successful a well thought out campaign can be.

Email marketing set up is easy, cost-effective and can be done with just a few clicks. The potential for reach is huge - we all know that email is a large part of everyday life in a personal capacity as well as professional. Just think, how many people do you know without an email address? Everyone with an email address is a potential email marketing recipient.

Personalisation

Marketing can often feel impersonal but with the right tools and know-how, email communications can be fully personalised to suit the recipient. The evolution of email marketing has moved away from the traditional 'send to all' style we have seen over the years and the power of personalisation should never be underestimated.

One size fits all campaigns can leave recipients feeling flat and undervalued causing their interest in your brand to fade, leading to an unsubscribe. Gone are the days when a 'spray and pray' campaign to the masses had a lasting impact on a consumer. Now they tend to be sent straight to the junk folder and forgotten about.

Inclusion of a detail such as first name with relevant content and a targeted offer can be a key driver for reading on or clicking the delete and unsubscribe buttons. 'Surprise and delight' campaigns providing a targeted offer will reward loyalty and keep the consumer interested in the product and brand. By ensuring the content is suitable to the recipient you can expect a higher engagement and reduce the risk of being categorised as spam.

With the correct personal data from an email marketing platform, marketers can create fully personalised campaigns and interact with consumers like never before. Emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.

Such data can include:

Name
Browsing behaviour
Purchase history

All data is vital in learning as much as you can about your target audience as individuals, their preferences and spending habits. Campaigns have the power to convert first-time buyers into loyal consumers through acquisition and retention. For example, showing products a customer may like based on their previous purchase history will drive far more click-throughs than a mass campaign promoting products that they have never been interested in before. There is a chance you could miss out on revenue through a lack of engaging, interesting, highly relevant content.

Segmentation

Segmentation will divide subscribers into groups which can then be targeted with more relevant content. To highlight its importance, marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue (Campaign Monitor). Using this type of marketing tool will enable you to target customers based on unique characteristics such as location, demographics and purchase history. These groups will allow you to create stronger, clearer marketing messages and in turn, convert potential consumers into buyers.

Segmentation provides a business with a way to measure the success of each campaign. A great way of testing engagement is through A/B testing - for example, testing different subject lines and content can show a huge difference in conversion rates. Ways to measure segmentation successes include open rates, click-throughs, revenue, deliverability and transactions.

Mobile Devices

It is now more important than ever to ensure that your campaign is mobile friendly and that content is fully optimized to suit multiple devices. Content that is unreadable or unclear when opening on a mobile device will see a reader lose interest quickly and press delete. Many cling to their phones like a lifeline and the phone is the first thing they look at when they wake up. Mobile opens account for 39% of all email opens (Litmus) – down slightly from 2019 due in part to COVID-19 and people travelling less so using their mobiles less for email. Although mobile use saw a slight decline in 2020, it still makes up the second most popular reading environment for your emails - so make sure they look good on a mobile device!

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation can help marketers to do much more with little additional effort. For example, automated campaigns can prompt subscribers to check out their basket. Most marketers have started to use marketing automation in some form, with 80% of companies reporting an increase in leads thanks to marketing automation (Funnel Overload, 2021)

Examples of automated email campaigns include:

Welcome
Nurture
Re-engagement
Purchase confirmation
Cart abandonment
Order status
Thank you

These styles of campaigns can inspire engagement and drive web traffic through click-throughs. We talk now about marketing automation, but it is our belief that in years to come, it will be the norm and not an exception. It will become so important, that we will be devoting an entire blog, maybe even a series of blogs to the topic. Watch this space.