What Is Email Marketing? Features Of Email Marketing
Email Marketing is the process of sending commercial messages via email to promulgate your business and/or your brand. Email marketing is considered to be one of the most effective tools of communication and marketing strategy for any business. With the advent of Social Media, there were some doubts regarding the efficacy of Email marketing.
Various researches and surveys with consumers and business houses dispelled any such notion that email marketing had lost its importance in the digital marketing process. In fact, Email Marketing has reinforced its presence in recent times.
Email is a compulsory feature of our everyday life. Whether it’s personal communication or business intimation, everything is majorly done through Email. So, it makes perfect sense to utilize the major communication tool to promote your business.
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How Did It All Start?
Email Marketing has been around for ages now. In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, a computer engineer by profession, developed a new system of exchanging messages. He created a system by which ArpaNet users could be linked with one another. That became the basis for the internet, news reports at that time said.
In 1972, Larry Roberts developed the first email management system. This allowed users to select and forward and even respond to messages. That started a new era of email communications that set the road for modern email technology.
Then, in 1996, and Microsoft produced Internet Mail and news 1.0. This was the third version of Internet Explorer which we now know as OUTLOOK.
Coming to the advent of the Email Marketing system, Gary Theurk, a marketing manager with a computer company DEC first showed the way to successful Email Marketing. It also paved the way to realize how email marketing could boost up business growth.
Gary Theurk sent mass unsolicited emails to Arpanet users promoting DEC’s (His Corporations) machine. What happened was unprecedented. Since this had an element of originality, DEC machines made millions from the sale of their machines.
The mass unsolicited mails are in modern times, named Spam. The only exasperating aspect of email marketing is the deluge of unsolicited emails that seem to crowd our inbox. What companies don’t realize is that by spamming our inbox, all they achieve is turning a customer off from a product. It has been seen in Research that the highest open rates of consumers opening their mails are when companies send around 2 emails per month. The barrage of unwanted emails makes consumers skeptical and irritated.
Hence, it is advisable to use this great marketing tool to disseminate information as and when necessary.
Why Do We Need Email Marketing Today?
However, modern businesses have realized the advantages of Email Marketing and take effective steps to promote their products through it.
Email Marketing encompasses all the marketing techniques that we use to promote our brand through emails. Whether it is an appealing discount coupon or the information of a new store opening, the limited deal schemes, and sales, all of these elements when communicated through emails comprise email marketing.
Email marketing helps to foster the relationship with customers; It helps in nurturing new leads and strengthening the relationship between your business and your existing customers.
Email marketing strives to inform and update your focus group about the various offers and marketing steps that the business takes to benefit them.
It is a form of direct marketing that seeks to fortify the relationship between the brand and the consumer to retain loyalty and recognition of the product.
Email Marketing is a form of direct marketing that aims to establish a strong connection with its consumers. The utility of Email marketing has been debated in the past but now the business houses have unanimously conceded- Email is an essential part of the marketing mix. The best thing is to create your list of permission-based emails so that you know that consumers are aware that you are going to send them emails with new information and developments on your business.
Let’s back up our claims with some statistics and facts related to email marketing
- According to Statista.com email users is 3.7 billion. That number is expected to grow to 4.3 billion by 2022.
- 81% of small and medium business enterprises depend on emails as the mode of communication for customer acquisition and 80% for retention
- Welcome Emails have an opening rate of 82% (Get Response 2017)
- 47% of email recipients will open your email based on the subject line alone (Optin Monster)
- Interactive value-added emails result in a 300% increase in click rates (Martech Advisor’s 2017)
- Sending 3 Abandoned Cart emails results in 69% more order than a single Mail (Omnisend 2018)
Some More Data
- According to recent reports, Emails related to Hobbies, Government, Arts, and artists have the highest open rates.
- Personalized Email Campaigns increase click-through rates by 14%
- You are 6 times more likely to get a click-through email than through a tweet. (Campaign Monitor. )
- 4,24% of email marketing traffic will make a purchase compared to 2.49% of search engine traffic and .59% of traffic from social media (Monetate 2019)
- 54% of marketing influencers mention increased engagement rates as their top priority. (Ascend)
There are many more such examples to reaffirm just how effective Email marketing is for a business of any size. Consequently, it is one of the most economical means of promoting your product with a massive rate of return on investment compared to other marketing channels. (ROI)
Billions of emails are sent out every day for various purposes. The majority of them are for commercial uses and to promulgate a product or service. According to reports, the increase in Email traffic has increased by 5% each year from 2015 to 2019. The number was 269 billion in 2017. It is being estimated that by 2022 the number of emails will increase to over 32 billion every single day.
With the abundance of emails and considering the influence it has on potential leads, marketers have to make renewed innovative efforts to bring their products to consumers’ notice.
Email Marketing has evolved immensely over the years. the statistics above are a roof of just how far email marketing has come from its initial days. Today it is not only one of the most convenient forms of online marketing. Email Marketing is one of the most popular forms of online Marketing owing to its numerous qualities over other marketing channels.
Features Of Email Marketing
Personalized Content
Email marketing allows you to create your own list of the target audience and send personalized messages to them. Your customers have unique tastes and preferences. You can craft perfect messages to cater to your customer keeping in mind their interests. This leads to better engagement and instills trust in consumers regarding your product as well as your commitment to your focus group. It is very important to establish that trust factor with your focus group for your product to make a place in their lives.
There is a key to creating successful personalized content. Bundles Email lists come with a quick problem solver. But its disadvantages outweigh its advantages. Make sure you put in the effort of researching your clients through the data available to you. Along with a bundled list (if you buy one), do create your own list of leads and subscribers that you gain through your website and landing pages. That helps to create more qualified prospects and better content for your target audience.
Credibility
Your credibility depends on the way you create your message along with the content in the subject line. You have to take a thorough interest in what your consumer needs. Addressing a need for your target audience helps in building credibility for your brand. A lot of times businesses send automated messages to people about a product that is of no use or interest to them. That not only annoys a consumer but contributes to negative feedback about your business. That can prove to be extremely detrimental to the growth of your business. It is important to ideate a message that will resonate with your target consumer for the effective marketing of your business.
Better brand recognition
There are certain phrases and combinations of words that you can create to give your business the unique identity it deserves. When you communicate your message to your target audience incorporating the same phrases that you use for your marketing in other channels, it creates instant cognizance of your brand.
Create interactive messages, something that is instantly recognizable to your target consumer. An icon or a logo might be the symbol of your brand for instant recognition. Work your email content around how your target consumer can relate to your brand.
More conversions
Your digital marketing strategy endeavors to create a favorable reputation for your brand through the implementation of different marketing strategies. Email Market is known to make as many as 6times more purchasing decisions than any other marketing channel. This is achieved by creating appealing content for email along with an irresistible CTA that urges readers to take the desired action. This results in more conversions for your product or service.
Cost-effective
Email Marketing is one of the most economical ways of marketing your business, brand, product, or service. Traditional marketing is a high-cost as well as time-consuming strategy. Emails solve a major part of the expense issue of business houses. They are so economical that all business enterprises medium or small can carry on their marketing strategies through targeted and segmented email marketing. Moreover, the different software and automation tools that are available come at a free or a nominal price. That way, It becomes all the more convenient to promote a business through Email.
Metrics to know what works and what does not
Email marketing is one of the most potent tools for online marketing as we have discussed time and again. One of the reasons is that it is very easy and convenient to measure the efficacy of your email as it reaches the inbox of your potential customer. You can track just how many people are opening your email, reading through the content, and then taking the desired action as described in the email. It’s easy to take note of the key metrics and improve on the same. The various tools available for measurement allow you to analyze and organize different information derived. Study and analyze the data with precision. This helps in making focused goal-driven points on how to optimize content for future emails.
Establishing authority
To create a business, sustain it, you need to project leadership, a sense of authority, and a distinct personality. Be responsible. Produce engaging emails regularly with a unique element to send to your consumers. Do not spam their inboxes with unnecessary newsletters that are of import. It establishes respect for your brand from your umpteen competition who send mindless emails, most of them irrelevant.
Create your reputation in a way that your customers, prospective and existing, take your emails seriously. Otherwise, they will dismiss your emails they will just land up in the trash/junk section without opening them ever.
Stronger Customer relationship
The bond between your business and your consumer is your potion for the growth and success of your business. Remember, your consumers will always appreciate a well-formatted, well-written email from your brand. A vast majority of the online focus group prefers communication through emails compared to other marketing channels. There is a distinctive feature of authenticity in emails that are compelling to your target customers. This is why it becomes all the more important for you to tailor your email content to align your specific goal with the requirements of your consumer.
For example: When you buy an exclusive product from Flipkart or Amazon, you sometimes get a message asking you to rate that particular product. If you open that email, you will notice it is actually from the manufacturer. They want your opinion on the product. That builds reliability in customers regarding a brand.
Emails- a basic element of the online world
As emails are a fundamental part of the online world, customers check their emails regularly out of habit. That is because it keeps us connected to our work as well as our personal needs. Can you imagine an online presence without an email ID? It’s unthinkable. We need to check our emails for various reasons every day.
This offers the opportunity for all businesses whether they are angel-funded big business houses or small and medium business houses to make contact with target groups easily. Email Marketing leverages this quality. It helps in getting the desired recognition of your brand with your consumers. Once you captivate your focus group with a strong email, you have a lead for your business. Thus, knowing that you can always rely on the email marketing system to get your brand noticed is important for any business.
Sharing Ability
Email content, a lot of times helps to captivate the audience so much that they decide to share the message with other marketing and communication channels. Make sure you add all the social sharing buttons in your email. It will introduce you to a vast pool of prospective clients and will also save time. A referral email campaign is a great way to accelerate your business objectives and venture into newer lead territories. Swiggy, Myntra, etc come up with engaging referral email campaigns whereby they come up with innovative gifts for existing customers when they refer to other people…
Cart Conversions
Cart conversions in the online parlance are the purchases that a user makes after they add items to the cart for purchase. Many a time, the customer gets occupied with something else, takes time to rethink the purchase, or simply forgets to go through with the purchasing process. As a result, the items remain in the cart abandoned. This is where Email Marketing comes to great use. Cart conversion messages help in reminding the customers that a potential purchase is waiting to be billed. This is known to be very persuasive as it reminds and urges the customer to finally go through their purchases.
Real-Time communication
You can always connect and communicate with your consumers in real-time in Email Marketing. Suppose there is some urgent message or new development to communicate with a group of your customers. You can always create a copy and send it to the consumers who can benefit the most from your information. Emails are great marketing tools to disseminate timely information so that the benefits can be optimized from such a message. Through emails, you can efficiently address any grievance and answer important questions of your customer in real-time. This means they don’t have to wait indefinitely to get an answer from you. You can attend to them without delay.
Building curiosity and desirability
Sometimes an element of surprise on a CTA ( Call-To-Action) creates the required curiosity and buzz about your product. Whether it’s a privileged sales offer or a discount coupon, building curiosity about your product through an interesting email copy can yield great results.
For example…Create a compelling copy and then add ” Click for an offer you can’t reject!” as your CTA. This will lead to your potential consumers clicking through your email because of the curiosity factor. Every customer likes good deals. Cash backs, free tickets to your favorite movies, newly launched apparel at a very attractive offer, time-limited deals for some special customers are some great offers. They help in not only retaining customers but word-of-mouth gets really fast. The result is a morale boost for your consumers and a sales boost for your brand.
Reach on any device just as effectively
Your Emails can be customized to appear on different devices optimized for that particular device. This helps in a much wider reach and visibility especially because most emails are opened on mobile phones nowadays. You have to take the utmost care to optimize your email content and format to fit the requirements of display on a mobile phone, tablet, or laptop. Paste clear images with good resolution, clear concise copy with considerable white space. Use apt words to perfect your email copy for the best readability.
Content Mix
An email can have a variety of content to make it more interesting for your leads and consumers. It can have a combination of text, images, attachments, videos. They can also have links embedded for videos or certain pages of a website. Additionally, emails come with a unique quality of no constraints where words or characters are concerned. You can delineate pertinent information and send out messages to your consumers.
But don’t make it too long or otherwise, they won’t read it. You will sometimes notice some detailed messages including specifications for particular products or services, especially in electronic devices. Those are described in detail but not long enough for readers to lose interest. Make sure the points are clear and the writing is simple.
Increased traffic to your website
Well-drafted emails can be very useful in driving traffic to your website. Attach an attractive CTA button to your website, blog, or product links. With the tools available you can always carry out split testing and see which format of copy drives the best results. For Instance, a Green CTA button with bold text might work better than an Orange CTA button. There can be various reasons why a consumer chooses to select one format over the other. Always make sure your content and CTA in Email Marketing come to the notice of your prospective customers and find their way to your website.
Automation and Segmentation
Email marketing through automation is one of the most important tools for creating personalized marketing emails. It helps to build a strong foundation of faith between your business and your consumer. Several Email automation tools make your work much easier. You can benefit immensely from these automation tools and create. Drip campaigns can be implemented through automation tools. A lot of times you will notice that after you check out a certain website without making a purchasing decision you either get email messages with similar products listed or you get an email asking if you have any doubts.
Personal Touch
When you are sending emails to a subscriber list or a mailing list that you’ve created yourself, you have the option of adding a certain personal touch to your email. Segmentation of your customers makes sure that you place the most relevant product or service for them in your email display. Moreover, it would feel like you are responding to that particular customer. This adds to your brand’s goodwill. Customers know that you are aware of their needs and will cater to them.
Conclusion
As you can see from the qualities mentioned above, Email Marketing is a process that requires details and care. Once you start using the different benefits Email Marketing has to offer you will notice that rewards make the efforts seem minimal. Email Marketing gets you maximum returns on investment and outdoes your marketing objectives. The only prerequisite is the will to put in the effort to know your customer and their needs. Once that is determined, your email marketing campaign is pretty much sorted.
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