Why Email Marketing Is Important—The Benefits of Email Marketing
As social media grew in popularity, many marketers started to question the future value of email marketing. Those thoughts, however, quickly waned as marketers saw the return on investment (ROI) of email continue to be the best among all marketing channels. What are the advantages of using email? Check out this list of reasons why email marketing is king for business owners.
What Is Email Marketing and the Benefits of Using It?
Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that involves businesses sending promotional messages via electronic mail to a group of prospects and customers. It’s widely used as an efficient and cost-effective method for new customer acquisition, building brand awareness, and increasing product sales, as well as fostering trust and loyalty with a company’s customer base.
The role of email for marketers is continuing to grow stronger, despite the increasing popularity of social networks and text messages. This is demonstrated in global benchmarking research presented in the report, Email Marketing & Marketing Automation Excellence 2017:
- Compared to other digital-marketing channels, email is top rated by marketers, with 53.6% of respondents rating it as excellent or good. Social media marketing and search engine optimization are rated second and third by marketers, respectively, with excellent or good ratings of 50.9% and 45%.
- More than half (58%) of the companies surveyed said that they are planning to increase their email-marketing budget, whereas only 7.5% are planning to decrease their budgets.
Marketers in this survey also expressed their confidence in the advantages of emails, especially compared to other marketing channels. But which email-marketing benefits were the marketers primarily trying to achieve? Here are the top benefits of email marketing, according to the marketers who responded to the survey:
- 23% said generating more leads
- 19% said improved sales
- 17% said improved conversion rates
- 13% said reduced marketing costs
- 12% said identifying better-quality leads
- 9% said integrating with other media to boost response
- 3% said shorter sales cycles.
Advantages of Email Marketing
The following email-marketing advantages demonstrate why email marketing is effective and continues to be so widely used by marketers today:
- Email is the marketing channel preferred by consumers to communicate with companies. According to research conducted by MarketingSherpa, 60% of survey respondents chose email as the preferred way to receive promotions and regular updates from companies with which they are interested in doing business. Only 20% of respondents chose social media, and 17% chose text messages.
- Email has been shown to generate a better ROI compared to other marketing channels. A survey by the Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric of marketers in the United States showed that email achieved a median ROI of 122%, which was more than 4 times higher than other marketing channels, including social media (28%), direct mail (27%), and paid search (25%). And in 2016, email marketing generated $44 ROI for every $1 spent, which was up from $38 in 2015.
- You can easily personalize your email messages. From inserting a subscriber’s name in subject lines and email messages to creating emails that target customers’ individual interests and needs, there’s a wide variety of marketing tools and software available today that can help companies simplify and streamline the process of sending personalized emails to their customer base.
- You can easily segment groups of your prospects and customers and send them specific marketing messages that target their personal needs and interests. By segmenting your email list, you can take the personalization of your emails to a whole new level. Demographic, geographic, and behavioral (e.g., past purchases) are a few of the types of data that you can use to target different segments of your email list and send more relevant and personalized email content.
- With automated emails, you can increase your one-to-one marketing communications and, at the same time, reduce the number of employee-hours needed. Automation is the cornerstone of successful triggered and nurturing campaigns. It’s also another important tool for creating relevant and personalized marketing emails. And thanks to advancements in email-marketing automation software, it’s more affordable than ever, even for many small businesses. For more information and marketing tips on how to harness the power of automation for your email-marketing campaigns, check out the following marketing resources from FulcrumTech:
- It’s easy to test, optimize, and continually improve your email-marketing results. Which subject lines, preheaders, calls to action, headlines, content marketing messages, and email template designs resonate most with your target audience? With the right email testing and optimization strategy, you can quickly improve elements of your email campaigns to achieve substantially better performance results and higher ROI.
For insight into FulcrumTech’s successful email testing and optimization strategy—which we use to drive double- and even triple-digit-percentage improvements in the performance of our clients’ email campaigns—be sure to read our recent article on the topic: “Using Email Testing and Optimization to Improve Your Campaigns.” - Email makes it easy for your subscribers to share your marketing messages. With the click of a button, your subscribers can share your company’s email message, such as a promotional code or details of a special sale, with their friends and colleagues. Check out this recent NewsLever feature for tried-and-true tips to optimize the performance results of your referral email campaigns.
- It’s easy to track engagement, as well as sales and conversions, in your email campaigns. To make smart, data-driven decisions about your email-marketing efforts and to optimize your email ROI, there are key email metrics that you should be measuring and analyzing. That’s what we cover in this article: “Data-Driven Email Marketing—Key Metrics You Should Be Tracking.” In addition, FulcrumTech has developed an online analytics email-marketing platform—IntelliSents—that makes organizing and analyzing email-marketing data even easier. IntelliSents presents data in easy-to-read dashboards for real-time tracking and monitoring of email campaign performance. Be sure to check it out!
- Email marketing is environmentally friendly. It helps save paper (and trees, too).
Why Use Email Marketing?
Why is email marketing important? Compared to the many marketing channels available today to reach your target audience, email is the most effective channel for capturing attention, as well as engaging and connecting with prospects and customers to drive sales and revenue. No other channel is as successful at building strong customer relationships as email marketing.
Are you getting the most from your email-marketing program? If you’re challenged by building a high-quality, permission-based email list and developing a winning email strategy to engage and convert your target market, FulcrumTech can help. From crafting effective promotional emails and email newsletters to implementing marketing automation and testing and optimizing your email campaigns, FulcrumTech’s team of certified email marketers will get the results for which you’re striving. Contact us and get started today!