Ahhhh, marketing. Where does one even START to figure out which method is the best choice for your company/specific venture. The market is currently flooded with a massive amount of marketing initiatives, all of them “highly successful” and “the next big thing”.
Deciding where to invest your marketing budget isn’t a decision you take lightly as a business owner. You need to attract new customers and retain good relationships with current clients, while spreading brand awareness and putting yourself out there – spending time and resources on something that ultimately ends up being a big failure can set you back quite a bit.
Luckily, there are a few tried and tested methods out there that are guaranteed to deliver results, one of them being: Email Marketing. Email marketing has the highest return if investment (ROI) rate of all forms of marketing. That I just one of the several benefits that Email Marketing has to offer. Below, we list a few of these benefits, showing you why this marketing method stands out above all the rest.
Cost Effective
Every form of online marketing comes with some costs, but compared to other methods, email is tremendously cheap and doesn’t have to use a large portion of your budget. Initially, an email marketing campaign can be completely free. Moving forward, if you decide to purchase software or make use of a marketing agency, you can still manage to work with a budget that suits your pockets.
Personalisation and segmentation
With Email marketing, you can send emails to subscribers who meet certain criteria – it allows you to segment your customers into different lists based on their preferences to send highly personalized content. The potential for engagement and conversion increases significantly with personalised emails.
Scalable & Flexible
Both the emails you send and how you send them are highly flexible. You can send normal, basic text emails, format them to your heart’s content, spice them up with branded graphics, and send attachments directly to the reader. Furthermore, you can alter your market targeting by creating different groups. Some emails may be relevant to all customers who have opted-in, while others might be more suitable to a smaller sub-section of your market. Either way, you can scale the campaign to match, reaching large audiences or smaller targeted lists.
Shareable
It’s easy and simple for recipients to forward and share your email content, with great deals and limited offers at the mere click of a button. This is a great way of building your reputation by word-of-mouth or viral marketing, which may help influence new customers to become followers of your brand.
Time saving
With email marketing, the most time spent is working on perfecting your campaign, which afterwards can be sent to thousands of people automatically. You can take it even further with specialized automation – through automation you can trigger emails to be sent to customers based on an action they have performed on your website – e.g. send a welcome email when a user signs up to your website, or issue an email offering a discount incentive if user abandons an online shopping cart.
Measurable
You get several software options that include tracking and reporting functions and analytics, which allows you to gain valuable insights as to your email campaigns. You can see how many emails were sent successfully, how many emails “bounced”, how many were opened, how many clicked, led to conversions, and more. Ultimately, you receive key pieces of information that can help you understand the success of your campaign, with the ability to change or tweak your campaign to make it more successful.
Boosts Sales & conversions
Email marketing is a great opportunity to entice and incentivise customers, by offering limited time offers, specials, listing last purchases as a reminder, etc – the perfect way of taking advantage of impulse buying. The easier you make it (adding a call to action and link straight to checkout), the easier it becomes to give in to the temptation. Furthermore, email marketing is extremely effective at literally every stage of the buying process – you can influence someone to choose your product, nurture the customer relationship post-transaction and also encourage future purchases.