In modern marketing, email is widely thought to be unable to offer the same benefits as search or social media. This couldn’t be further from the truth. On the contrary, email remains an essential tool that brands should look to consistently capitalise on. So, what benefits can email marketing bring to an integrated digital campaign?
Relationship Building
Email marketing presents much more of a two-way relationship than most forms of digital marketing. According to HubSpot, 86% of professionals prefer to use email when communicating for business purposes. The act of subscribing shows a genuine trust and meaningful engagement from users, who are actively expressing that they care about a brand and the message that they are sharing. That consent seldom exists in paid, targeted forms of marketing, meaning brands can establish a dialogue that they know their audience is invested in. Suffice to say, the introduction of GDPR should only serve to enhance this relationship.
With strong data analysis, email marketers can draw upon registered interests, preferences, contact history, buying patterns and even online behaviour. Using email marketing allows us to send tailored information to suit the customer or subscriber and therefore increase the chances of conversion.
Retargeting
Customers who subscribe to a mailing list via a website are most likely going to be interested in the products and services that are offered. According to Statista, 86% of consumers want to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with at least monthly, while 15% would like them daily.
Taking advantage of the relationships initiated with clients is key to meeting your business goals. For example, if you run an online shoe store and sell women’s party shoes to a specific group of customers, why not send them targeted newsletters about future party shoe offers? By customising your offers to their purchasing, you’ll be able to build on the relationships that you’ve already established with these customers. Brands can also offer special subscriber offers as an incentive to stay subscribed.
Increasing Brand Awareness
Brand awareness through email marketing doesn’t just serve to increase online sales; it also helps brands build an online community and reputation, and can even assist with offline efforts too.
Customers prefer to purchase from brands they are familiar with, so marketers should look for innovative ways to increase a brand’s outreach. For example, if you’ve planned a social media competition, you could let your subscribers know first and point them in the direction of the relevant social pages. In addition, email marketing can be another source to drive visits to a website not just for sales but also to blog pages.
Integration With Other Platforms
Email marketing should never be viewed in isolation from other marketing channels. Social media works particularly well in tandem with email as part of a detail content marketing plan. Highly shareable content distributed via an email platform with social media sharing options can help content marketers reach a target audience at exactly the right time in a far more direct way than typical social media activity. If email marketers can think beyond the results of their individual campaigns and cconsider howemail can support other areas of a marketing strategy, then success is sure to follow.
Tracking
Where email really sets itself apart from ‘the pack’ is in its detailed tracking. Open and click rates provide the typical numbers and percentages that marketers and businesses alike need to see. More specifically, it breaks down the activity to individual recipients, which allows any follow-up activity to be truly personal to that user. When it comes to email, personalised messages largely impact and increase click-through rates. How email marketers use their data and reporting tools is vital to the success of email and wider digital marketing strategies.
If you would like to discuss how email marketing can support your business, get in touch with the StrategiQ team today.