If you are marketer and are looking at digital channels, you probably have SEO to reach your audience, use SEM, and PPC to get interested audience to click through to your website and also have Social Media presence to build awareness and engage your audience. However, not many marketers swear by Email Marketing. Here are a few awesome reasons to look at Email Marketing this festive season.
It’s a direct channel.
Behind the mountains of online and offline purchase data, loyalty points system and CRM servers is the data about your customer or prospect. It can be a name of customer, with her physical address or her loyalty card number. In short anything that identifies your buyer uniquely.
This unique identifier in the online world is the email address. I call it the most important address on the Internet that you can own especially if you are conducting business online. We, as digital marketers, should give this CRM data, especially the email addresses its deserved respect, comb it for correctness, and update it regularly, literally like ants in an ant hill. This is your own data of customers that you can finally build a direct dialog with.
This email address is more valuable because the customers have given the permission to receive emails. If this permission is abused, it’s a simple matter for your email to land in the junk folder or worse be marked as spam. This has far serious implications than many marketers think and eventually you will see erosion in trust in your brand.
However done right, it will result in direct sales for you. (Download the Forrester Research)
It’s a measurable channel.
When you send your email message to your readers, you instantly get to know who opened your email, if it was read (Yes there are tools for that too!), who clicked on which links and what they did on the website.
My own experience is that for my website over half the year that
Email Visitors spent 30% more time on the website than regular visitors.
Email Visitors also viewed more pages on the website and had much fewer bounce rate that other visitors.
This channel has published benchmarks.
Did you know that the average open rate for Email is about 12 to 15%? You can now compare your campaign performance and work towards improving it.
If you send an email with a targeted subject line to customers who have not opened you can improve your overall open rate even further.
You can also segment the audience based on the offer they clicked on and send further customized offer to this engaged audience.
Avinash Kaushik (Avinash is a thought leader in Website Analytics) wrote a very interesting post about email marketing recently.
To quote from Avinash’s post:
“Email remains an immensely credible and profitable channel, with an immense reach to boot. To not have it as an active part of your marketing portfolio is sub-optimal. The only requirement is that your mental model (and indeed, company culture) should be solidly rooted in permission marketing. Every fiber of your being. Every thought that crosses your mind. Every person in your company. Embrace permission marketing and email will be a surprising and loyal BFF”
Have you tried the power of email marketing?
(Note: This article was published today on MediAvataar.com)