Email Marketing

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New may be exciting in the marketing world, but traditional doesn’t mean outdated. An email marketing strategy can be one of the most cost-effective strategies you can adopt.

Social media news can seem compelling enough for even seasoned marketing professionals to ditch email. But while trying out new content formats on trending platforms like Clubhouse and TikTok is important for staying relevant, tried-and-true email marketing is still a powerful opportunity to engage current and potential customers in the long term.

Here are four compelling reasons why email marketing is still important for your internet marketing plan.

1. Consumers Prefer Email Marketing

When selecting your marketing channels, one question you should always ask yourself is this: Where would my ideal customer prefer to hear from me?

A Twilio study found that 83% of consumers worldwide prefer receiving emails from marketers. In addition, Twilio found that when marketers meet customer communication preferences, clients will reward them with an action, whether that’s a website visit or an actual purchase.

Investing in email as a marketing channel can help you improve client satisfaction and achieve your marketing and sales goals.

Plus, over 90% of U.S. adults use email. This is significantly higher than the 72% of U.S. adults using as little as one social media channel. Email marketing isn’t just preferred — it’s more accessible, too.

2. Email Engagement Beats Social Media Engagement

Tracking your engagement rates on each of your marketing channels is crucial for understanding your progress toward measurable goals. Email and social media both make it easy to keep an eye on your metrics over time. But when was the last time you compared your email and social media engagement rates side by side?

What may surprise you is that email produces far higher engagement than social apps. Unless you pay for ads, the average Facebook post only reaches about 6% of your followers, whereas email open rates can be as high as 30%. If you include an enticing offer, such as a promo code or free shipping, an impressive 71% of email recipients would be willing to take action.

When you take extra steps to strengthen your content marketing strategy, like sticking to a schedule, you can further boost your engagement rate.

3. Valuable Content is King

You may have heard the phrase “content is king.” But in the age of information overload, it’s valuable content that really stands out — and email is a great channel for delivering it.

Email is completely customizable for your business. When you want to reach your audience through pay-per-click ad platforms like Facebook and Google, you’ll run into strict character limits and image requirements. Email, on the other hand, empowers you to switch up the format and length of your content to provide the most value (and the best experience) possible for your audience.

Since 70% of internet users would rather learn about products through true content instead of an ad, email is a critical platform.

Email is also customizable for specific audience members, too. Many email service providers now allow marketers to create dynamic content, which shows email recipients unique content based on characteristics you select (such as subscription date, gender, or purchase history). This increases the value of your content by making it more relevant to the person receiving it.

Create more content your audience loves faster by using the reverse engineering process or by using online sticky notes to collaborate with your team and organize content ideas.

4. Email Marketing Is Cost-Effective

Email marketing can reduce your costs. Just by subscribing to an affordable email marketing service, you can reach a mass audience unlimited times per month — without paying per click, as you would with social media or search engine ads. Free or low cost email marketing plans may work for small businesses, which means you can get impressive results at little to no cost.

Here are a few to investigate. They have either a free plan or a free trial:
AWeber
GetResponse
ActiveCampaign
Encharge
MailRush (for B2B only)

When you choose email marketing, you can also streamline your campaign creation process. For example, once you design a drip campaign (which is a sequence of emails), you can even automate its send by setting up a trigger. For example, a contact joining your email list could trigger a sequence of welcome emails, making this channel more efficient for customer acquisition than social media.

A tool like FunnelMates can even automate your email content creation and schedule campaigns for you.

Email content is also simple to create while you’re on the go. When creativity hits, you can easily pull out your smartphone and use your favorite writing app to write content or save photos and videos to the cloud. Then simply plug in content to your email template when you’re ready. This way, you can take advantage of time that would be otherwise wasted.

Thanks to the cost savings that email allows for, this marketing channel can help you achieve up to a 4,400% return on investment (ROI).

Make Email Your Go-To Marketing Channel

Email marketing isn’t going anywhere. If you want to maximize your engagement, your client satisfaction, and your ROI, this is a channel that you can’t afford to overlook. Even as social media takes a bigger piece of the marketing conversation, email will, for years to come, remain a reliable tool for you to get results.

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