Why does email marketing still work (and how to make it work for you?)
Is email marketing dead? Have you ever thought it is one of the most successful marketing channels on the web?
See some email advertising facts below:
- In 2017, global e-mail users amounted to 3.7 billion users. This figure is set to grow to 4.1 billion users in 2021. (Statista)
- Email has a median ROI of 122%. Over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail, and paid search. (DMA and Demand Metric)
- Email has nearly three times as many user accounts as Facebook and Twitter combined(Neil Patel)
- Email marketing have an average return of $38 for every dollar spent
- 61% of customers enjoy receiving promotional emails weekly. 38% would like to receive emails to come even more frequently.
(Statista)
- 88% of smartphones users actively check email on their phones. This makes it more popular than any other app for both iPhones and Androids. (pewinternet.org)
- Welcome emails are incredibly effective: on average, 320% more revenue is attributed to them on a per email basis than other promotional emails. .(easy-smtp.com)
- 49% of businesses use some form of email automation. (easy-smtp.com)
Of course, there are businesses around who don’t believe in the power of email marketing campaign. You have surely heard that “email marketing is long dead” and “email marketing is not working anymore”.
There’s a reason why people think like this is that they don’t get expected results from email advertising. Instead of trying to find out what did they wrong and fix it, they abandon email marketing completely.
I mean it is hard to blame them. Learning how to use email marketing effectively isn’t the easiest thing in the marketing world. There are many things you have to know before you will be getting into email advertising.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is communicating with your current and future customers with an independent communication channel, meaning email. You can use it to send blast emails, newsletters, offers and relevant information to your customers. Think about it as sending leaflets to thousands of people at the same time!
What is important, while not all your customers have a social media account or are reading blogs, surely all of them use their email regularly. When it comes to B2B, email is the quickest and most effective channel of communication – that is, as long as you know what are you doing.
There are two kinds of marketing emails you can send – plain text and HTML emails. What are the differences between them? Is it worth to work on email design while plain text emails might give you similar effect?
Plain text emails
The plain text approach requires only text. No colors, no fancy templates. They might look boring but it’s worth to look deeper into their advantages.
First of all, this kind of communication is free of distractions and easy to reload. That means it suits perfectly for all mobile devices such as tablets or smartphones. Imagine that you spent hours designing high-quality images for your email campaign but the content doesn’t show up in the user’s browser.
Sounds like the worst scenario?
Unfortunately, it happened quite often. According to CampaignMonitor.com, 48% of respondents claim they don’t see images automatically. To be honest we doubt if many folks change their browser settings just to show images.
Plaintext emails have better deliverability on average. Email with lots of images and links but very little content is usually a red flag and goes to SPAM folder. From this point of view, less is more.
Another pros of plain text emails?
They are perfect tool to build connection with your customers. Basic layout makes your message more personal, just like sent by a friend. It looks like prepared by person instead of an organization. Try it if you are looking for a method to drive engagement.
If plain text emails sound for you encouraging, remember that they still require simple formatting. Don’t be afraid to use italics, bold and remember to use all caps for headlines.
HTML emails
HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language. It’s the way email templates are coded so HTML emails contains colors, links and graphics.
Choosing this kind of communication be aware that design of well-looking and well-working HTML email takes more time than a plain text option.
HTML should be aligned with your company brand, incorporate proper fonts, colors and represent your company image. Don’t be afraid if it sounds troublesome – see below two main superiorities of HTML.
With HTML emails you need to give a lot but also you can receive nice results.
If your main objective is to convert a sale, HTML gives you options that you won’t have in plain text. Clickable buttons and links let your recipients to take an action upon getting your message.
Sometimes there is no choice and information you are presenting needs to be visually organised. If you want to give to the customer clear communicate, you should consider HTML emails.
Provide clients with properly chosen graphics so they will understand your message better than with plain text. Image speaks a thousand words..
If you are not sure which option works better, you can always send HTML with plain text attached as option B. It will be displayed if the HTML won’t be loaded. Most of email providers offer this way as a default option.
What are the other benefits of email marketing?
Day-to-day contact
While not everyone checks their social account every day and not everyone has time to read blog posts daily, it’s the opposite for emails. Majority of people check their email once a day to see did they get any new messages (you do it too, don’t you?).
Why is it important? Just because you know that your customers check their emails daily, you can communicate with your audience every day!
Email marketing gives you more conversions
As shown in many different researches and surveys, email marketing often has higher conversion rates than any other marketing tactics. According to McKinsey, an average value of an email is at least 3x higher than the average value of social media posts!
With engaging email with a visible CTA button, you can encourage your customers to take actions (since as buying a full version of your product)!
Email marketing is cheaper than traditional marketing tactics.
When compared to the more traditional marketing tactics such as advertisements or print media, email marketing is relatively inexpensive. Email marketing requires only a bit of time and resources to develop eye-catching content, as opposed to for example printing leaflets.
What is more, email marketing also has a quite high return on investment rate (ROI in short). According to Email Monday, businesses can expect an average return of $38 for every $1 they spend on email marketing!
Email marketing is easy to measure and to customise
Therse is no need to guess how your email campaign is doing. You can quickly check how many people open, read and use your email CTA button and are your emails delivered to the customers inboxes. With this data, it’s easier and faster to decide if your email campaigns are successful.
It’s also easier to add changes to your email newsletter – it only takes a few clicks. And with A/B test, you can quickly notice what things are working for your business. It lets you also to get closer to the “best” email layout for your business.
Email marketing can be automated
Overwhelmed? Too many emails and too little time? Too many campaign data leads to chaos? It’s a clear sign you need a marketing automation tool!
Email marketing tools have a variety of features that help you deal with simple but time-consuming tasks. For example it allows you to segment your email list, send messages on a set schedule or add a personalised touch to your newsletters.
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Not only this will make your campaigns more effective, but it will save your and your team time!
I tried email marketing, but the results were pretty weak…maybe it’s not working for my company? Learn about..
Email marketing traps you should avoid
Even if your email campaign failed, there’s no reason to give up on email marketing entirely, maybe your email campaign needs a few tweaks?
Many marketers learned it the hard way that writing an marketing email is no longer as easy as writing “Hey, buy our product”. In 2018, you need to put more effort.
Summing up, there are many things you need to have in mind while preparing your email campaign. See below list of traps waiting for inexperienced marketers.
Trap 1: Email lists are as good as generated ones
First of all before you start sending your emails, you must have a list of addresses to which you will send your newsletter. But from where you can get them, fast and easy?
When searching for ways to generate email lists, you will come across “helpful” people who will offer to sell you already prepared email list.
Watch out – instead of the road to marketing success, you might find yourself in a dead end. There’s a number of reasons why buying a pre-made email list are a questionable choice.
- You have no way to check are those emails on your lists valid and not just made up on the spot. You are basically buying a pig in the poke.
- Even if the emails are genuine, people you mail have no idea about your services and are very unlikely to buy anything from you.
- There is a high chance your emails will end in the spam section which makes your email campaign efforts futile.
- In addition, your domain might be blacklisted, and it’s tough to get your domain out of the blacklist.
- Sending emails to addresses from the bought email lists is against GDPR law. With the law in effect, marketers are allowed to send marketing emails only to people who’ve given “freely given, specific, informed and unambiguous” consent. If you’re unsure whether your audio or video business collateral meets these requirements, you may consider using legal transcribing services.
Trap 2: “Spray and pray.”
Sending emails to random people who might turn out to be interested in your offer was an excellent tactic years ago. Consequently, it will lead you straight to the spam filters rather than customers inboxes.
Before you start sending your emails, you need to know who is your audience. What are their interests, their age, what they might need? What form of email could interest them most? What issues could you solve? Offering your users relatable and useful content gives you a better chance of getting them interested in your offer.
Trap 3: The more, the better!
Especially please avoid using several pictures, complicated fonts, lots of exclamation marks and very bright colours in your newsletters.
We are not in the ’90s anymore, animations are not going to impress anyone 😉
An email layout with too many things going on not only will load longer (especially on mobile devices), but it will also annoy your customers.
Email newsletter should look clean, straightforward and professional. Who is going to take part in your sale if the information about it is covered by several pictures or written in an unreadable font? Or worse, if your email doesn’t even load on your customer’s computer?
Font chosen for the main text should be simple and easy to read. You might feel tempted to use a more stylised font to impress your customer, but you don’t know if your recipient will see the font in the same way as you. Finally, more elaborate fonts and cursives are good for headlines and only that. Also, don’t use more than two different fonts in one email – otherwise your email looks like a mess.
Trap 4: “Hey, our product is fantastic, buy it now” is the best subject line for an email.
The only thing you could achieve by having this kind of subject line is activating spam filters. Here you might ask, so what makes a good subject line?
But there’s no clear answer here – it depends on what you are offering and what do you want your customers to do. The possible benefits of your product should be stated upfront and summarised in as few characters as possible. No one is going to read a long title.
Trap 5: I don’t need a CTA button.
For what reason you started to use email marketing? To get more sales? More subscribers? More downloads of your trial version software? Whatever you need, you must make it clear to your customers.
Therefore if the recipients of your emails don’t know what they are supposed to do, campaigns probably aren’t going to be very useful. Make a visible CTA button leading your customers to do what you want them to do (like downloading a free trial).
If you already made one, but it doesn’t work in the way you hoped, it would be a good idea to do an A/B test. Maybe all you need is one small tweak – different colours, different placement or different text on the button.
Trap 6: No one is reading emails on mobile devices
If you are not optimising your emails for mobile devices, you are making a big mistake. Nowadays more and more customers checks their email accounts on a mobile device (smartphone, Ipad or tablet).
If your email looks great on computers but bad on mobiles (pictures or fonts don’t load), your open rates will suffer a lot.
If people can’t correctly view your email on smartphones, they won’t wait to see your email on computers – they will delete it. So before starting a new email campaign, make sure your email looks great both on desktops and on mobile phones.
Despite what many people are saying, email and email marketing are not going anywhere. It allows you to stay visible to your clients with minimal cost. You can target your message and measure email campaign results quite easily.
Rather than refusing to use it because your attempts were not successful, why not brush up on your strategy and use emails to their full potential?