Your business’ success depends heavily not just on marketing, but on the right marketing. I’ve seen so many businesses pump huge quantities of cash into marketing initiatives that just don’t give them the return they’re looking for.
Sure, they get a return, but what if that return could be better?
Today we are going to talk about a form of marketing most businesses often ignore.– email marketing.
Email marketing, on average, generates between $35 and $45 for every $1 spent. If you have an agency running your email marketing, your costs are going to start around $3,000, but with an ROI like that, the cost is more than worth it.
When the costs of so many forms of marketing are rising, email marketing is now more important than ever.
Here are a few major reasons why.
1. Everyone uses email, and email has a much higher reach than social media marketing
Four billion people use email on a daily basis. Only social media has a comparable number of daily users. Mobile users check their email 3 times or more daily.
However, unlike social media, email doesn’t have the same type of algorithms throttling your reach.
While it’s possible your email can be marked as spam if you’re blasting out to a list you purchased, it’s just as possible that your first email won’t be marked spam — only 1 of 6 emails get sent to spam.
2. Most people want to receive promotional emails
It might seem counterintuitive, but your customers actually want to receive emails from you — for 91% of Americans, email is their preferred method of getting promotions.
Compare this to another major form of marketing: social media. Only 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them on social.
If you’re using email, you’re reaching your customers the way they want to be reached, meaning they’re much more likely to take advantage of what you have to offer — remember, they gave you their email address because they actually want to be contacted.
If you’re emailing your own list (and not a purchased list), you’re marketing to customers and potential customers who have expressly asked you to market to them. You’re not pushing anything on them — you’re giving them what they’ve asked for.
3. Email marketing allows for many touch points in a short period of time
For B2B businesses, email marketing does something unique. You can interact with your customers over and over, which you must-do if you want to make a sale.
You need about 8 interactions with a customer before they’ll even consider buying something from you, so you can’t just rely on a single marketing campaign to do the trick.
Compare email marketing to direct mail marketing. Direct mail requires you to pay a designer and a copywriter to put together the piece. You have to buy a mailing list, and you have to pay for printing and distribution.
You might spend anywhere from 65 cents to $10 per person.
If you’re marketing to 10,000 people, that’s anywhere from $6,500 to $100,000 for a single campaign. More to the point, you’re only able to target customers by their zip code. With email marketing, you can segment your lists using demographic info and get a higher ROI.
If you’re marketing on a budget, you can save money and run the campaigns yourself. You’re just paying for the software and maybe the email list. If you’ve built the list yourself, you’re really only paying for the software. That might be only a few hundred dollars a month (or less) for the same 10,000 people.
However, if you want to get the most out of email marketing, you’re going to want to work with an agency. Top-notch agencies create winning strategies and employ experienced designers, copywriters, and data analysts to put those strategies into action
This avoids spamming your list, which can waste your budget. Instead, they will make sure your emails are targeting specific segments with specific campaigns, ensuring a higher ROI.
4. Simple A/B testing for marketing messages and promotions
Modern email marketing solutions almost all allow you to perform simple A/B testing. If you already have your own list, you can test a variety of marketing messages and promotions on your list to see which ones perform better.
You’ll probably get some revenue just from this part of the testing alone, but you can then use what you’ve learned to design other, more expensive campaigns.
As I mentioned earlier, direct mail marketing isn’t cheap. You don’t want to pour money into a direct mail campaign without having the best possible promotion or marketing message.
The same can be said for social media ads or search engine ads — testing those marketing messages and promotions first to find the best possible solution is invaluable.
5. Easier personalization at scale
71% of consumers prefer a personalized marketing experience, but with other types of marketing, like social media ads, search engine ads, and direct mail marketing, personalization either takes an enormous amount of time, money, or both.
For direct mail, you’re paying a printer to change the greeting for every single piece, adding quite a bit to the cost of traditional direct mail.
For social media ads and search engine ads, you’re not going to be able to change each ad to have the customer’s name on it — the best you can do is personalize them through other means, like retargeting based on their search history.
With email marketing, personalizing your greeting only requires a little piece of code that anyone can insert without coding knowledge. Every email you send is directed to a specific person with their name in the greeting, leading to a better customer experience.
