Email marketing is a popular marketing strategy where you reach out to previous customers, subscribers, or users via email. Topics can be centred around promoting new content on your website, running promotions, making announcements, or other important items for your business. It’s so popular that 69% of businesses spend time and money on their email campaigns.
If you’re in the minority, it may be because you think email is a little outdated with everyone on social media. So, is email marketing still relevant in 2022? Let’s talk about it!
How Effective Is Email Marketing?
With the right tools, email marketing can be extremely effective for your business. Believe it or not, many users spend as much as 5 hours a day on their emails, with more than half of all users saying they actively check every few hours. This means that an email is a great place for outreach.
Essentially, if you send emails to 10,000 people, you can assume that about 20% of your list will open your email. As your list grows, even a low conversion rate will still yield high rewards.
Also, you can do a lot to improve your conversion rates over time. If your list grows along with your conversion rates, email marketing could quickly become your most effective marketing channel. Even in 2022, that is the case for many businesses.
What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?
There’s a reason why email marketing is so effective and popular. Here are just a few examples of its benefits!
Email Marketing is Cheap to Start
If you pay $10 for a domain-specific email address and download a free template and subscription plugin, you’re out exactly $10. Starting an email campaign and running it over time is extremely affordable, even if you’re hiring professional email services.
Even on the higher end, email is still cheaper than social media management, ad campaigns, or SEO. First of all, email newsletters are less frequent than uploading blogs or posting on social media.
Second, unlike blog content, email marketing is short and concise. Hiring staff or a marketing team to write this content for you is not going to be very expensive.
Finally, you don’t need to create a “business profile” or buy a “business plan” for an email campaign. All you need is an active and professional email address, which can cost anywhere from $0 to $20. Email marketing is a low-risk, high-reward investment.
Email Marketing Has a High ROI
Did you know that email marketing has the highest average ROI of any marketing channel? Believe it or not, email campaigns yield an average of $42 for every $1 spent.
With so many people having emails and most of them checking multiple times a day, email is a great outlet to reach people. Also, your email list can grow into millions, and it still won’t cost an extra dime. Over time, your ROI is only likely to improve.
Even better, email campaigns are easy and free to monitor. Improving upon them over time is easy to do, which yields a high return on average.
Integration With Digital Marketing Strategy
One of the best parts about email marketing is how easy it is to integrate it with your existing marketing efforts.
For example, emails can easily link to your website, social media, or anywhere else. Conversely, your SEO, ads, and social media efforts can easily direct traffic to sign up for mailing lists. This mutually beneficial relationship can help grow your digital marketing efforts as quickly as possible.
Personalization
Unlike SEO or social media content, you can personalize emails with great accuracy. Emails with personalized subject lines receive 26% higher open rates on average. It’s an easy way to boost your campaign.
This can be as simple as using your recipients’ names in the subject lines, or it can include personalized deals based on their previous search or purchase history. Try doing that with a blog!
Email Automation
It’s easy to automate certain emails. Receipts, welcome emails, birthday wishes, and more will require little to no work on your part. This allows for immediate returns and instant gratification from the point of view of your audience.
How to Get the Most Out of Your Email Marketing Campaign
Now that you know why email marketing is so important, you probably want to know how to put it to use. Here’s what you need to know for a successful email marketing campaign!
Remember Your First Impression
The name and subject line of an email are your first impressions. For this reason, they need proper optimization to build impressions.
Every email campaign should start with a clear and concise name. Are you going to open an email from “Walter Smith with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration”? Probably not, considering you’ll only see “Walter Smith with…” and you’ll think “I don’t know a Walter Smith” before deleting it.
That name could have easily been “Gordon with NASA,” and recipients would have known who was emailing them. Keep your name as clear and concise as possible.
From there, try different strategies with your subject lines over time. There are thousands of strategies to choose from in the subject line, so see what works for you!
Track KPIs
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the most important metrics for your email campaign to track. You can track most of these using free tools like Google Analytics, but some are more specialized. The most important KPIs to track are:
- Open rates
- Engagement rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
- ROI
There are plenty of other KPIs that can affect your strategy, but this is a good start. Tracking these will help you know when and how to make adjustments to your campaign over time, leading to continuous growth!
Email Marketing Tests
Testing your email campaigns over time is the only way to learn what your audience wants. A/B tests are an easy and effective way to test what works with your mailing list. If you haven’t heard of them, they’re pretty straightforward.
Simply divide your email list into two equal groups and send one email to each. These emails should be nearly identical but with one clear distinction. This could be on the type of promotion, the subject line, personalization, and more.
Using your favourite analytics tools, track the performance of these two versions and see which works better. Over time, this will give you a great idea of your audience’s preferences, which will help you optimize your conversion rates!
Building an Email Marketing List
There are many strategies for building an email newsletter list, and you can try as many as you like. At the bare minimum, ensure that your website has plenty of prompts for users to sign up for your newsletter at every step of their journey. This includes landing pages, blog content, and point of sale.
Retaining Recipients
This is one of the most challenging parts of email marketing, but it has to be done right. It’s easy to go overboard with retention, but it can result in negative consequences. If you try too hard to stop people from unsubscribing, then you risk ending up in the junk email.
When users can’t easily unsubscribe, they will turn to alternatives like reporting your email as spam. For this reason, it’s better to embrace the losses to your email list and consider them “cleaning out” and improving your conversion rates. If they want to unsubscribe, they probably won’t add much value to your list anyway.
Focus on Engagement
The best way to retain email list recipients is to focus on engagement. Make them want to stay on your email list by not bombarding them with emails, offering quality promotions, and personalizing their content. By testing and tracking metrics over time, make adjustments and continue improving your email campaign for the best results!
There are plenty of ways to improve engagement. For example, use visuals, keep your text concise, and offer value to your users. From there, entice them to follow the funnel of your choice, and you’ll see results in no time.
Launch Your Email Marketing Strategy Today
Now that you know the benefits of email marketing, you can see why it’s still so relevant in 2022. When you follow the tips mentioned above, the sky is the limit. If you continue improving over time, you can see conversion rates far above what any ad campaign could ever offer.
Stay up to date with our latest digital marketing tips, and don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions or for help with your strategy!
