WHY EMAIL MARKETING?
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and highest performing digital marketing channels available. The ROI of email is 4,400%, which means that for every $1 you spend, you make $44 in profit. In fact, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. Consider these statistics:
FREQUENCY
89% of Americans check their email at least once a day.
POPULATION
In 2019, global email users amounted to 4 billion users.
BRAND
61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email.
WHAT IS EMAIL MARKETING?
Email marketing is just one aspect of an online marketing strategy which can include blogs, podcasts, social media, SEO, PPC, websites and more. It’s used to create human, helpful, and customer-driven conversations with your customers where you can share information about your products and services that results in sales.
It’s not just drafting a message and hitting the “send” button. You have to build a solid email list, make sure you’re complying with email regulations, and segment your contacts so you’re delivering the right message to the right people, at the right time. At the same you need to create emails that are attractive and capture the customers attention. For example…
HOW DOES IT WORK?
Email can be used for branding, engagement, acquisition, retention, direct sales, reactivation and promotion, making it one of the most versatile tools any business can use to grow their business.
The goal of email is to expedite a lead (a potential customer) from one stage of the customer journey to the next. The customer journey, seen below, is a map of touchpoints (blog, website, landing page, etc.) a lead makes from the time they first become aware of your brand to the time they make a purchase (when they become a customer) and go on to promote your brand.
Depending on where your leads are in the customer journey, you can tailor specific emails to engage them with relevant content.
THE FUNNEL
Another way to understand email marketing is to consider the email marketing funnel — also known as the sales funnel. It’s a system that helps you attract prospects, turn them into leads and convert them into paying customers.
So what’s the difference between a marketing funnel and customer journey you ask? Unlike the marketing funnel below, which is concerned with a customer’s stage of interest in your business, the customer journey tracks the individual touchpoints a lead encounters before making a purchase. They didn’t get to the same point in your funnel by following the same route. The customer journey is meandering and circuitous.
The funnel framework, such as the AIDA model from GetResponse below, is based on the theory that consumers move through a series of stages, from top to bottom, before they eventually buy a product or service.
So now that you know what email marketing is and why you should use it, are you ready to get started?
LIST BUILDING
Don’t have any emails yet or need to grow the list you have? No problem. Enter list building.
Email lists degrade by about 22.5% every year. People’s work email addresses change as they move between companies and others abandon old AOL and Compuserve email addresses in favor of modern platforms like Gmail.
Building a high quality email list can be accomplished by making it simple for people to subscribe to your email list with a contact form on your landing page and offering a valuable incentive to do so.
THE PROCESS
Let’s determine the goal of your email campaign, where your customers are in their journey and what types of emails are appropriate for them. An effective campaign that gets conversions includes personalization, enticing subject lines, great design, list maintenance and reporting.