In 2022, when you have social media for marketing purposes, you might wonder why anyone would ever use email marketing as a marketing platform.
Let me tell you that social media marketing ain't got nothing on email marketing. The average email marketing ROI is $51.52 for every $1.35 spent. Meanwhile, social media marketing ROI is tricky as results vary for each business, and it's more of a hit or miss.
Okay, no more shade on social media; it's actually a good marketing platform. But it's best not to put all your eggs in one basket and use several marketing channels.
This guide will elaborate on the benefits of email marketing to sway you to try email marketing as one of your marketing channels.
Table of contents
- 1. Email marketing is easy to set up and start
- 2. It is more cost-effective than other marketing channels
- 3. It can give a high return on investment (ROI)
- 4. You can see the impact of the campaign immediately
- 5. With email marketing, you can collect first-party data
- 6. You can create hyper-personalized campaigns
- 7. You have control over who sees the campaign
- 8. It helps you build better and lasting customer relationships
- 9. It helps generate traffic to your website
- 10. You can utilize email marketing to nurture leads
- 11. It can help you establish your brand reputation and build credibility
- 12. You can boost sales with different email campaigns
- 13. You can automate the email campaigns to save time
- Get started with email marketing
1. Email marketing is easy to set up and start
Unlike other forms of marketing, email marketing doesn't need a lot of time or technical knowledge to start. And, you don't need months to prepare or plan the campaign. Instead, you can create, design, and send campaigns to everyone on your email list in a few weeks with email marketing.
You can start by sending simple plain text emails or using ready-to-use templates to create a more sophisticated HTML or AMP email. There might be special campaigns requiring more prep time, but you can generally get them done in a short duration.
2. It is more cost-effective than other marketing channels
In most cases, with traditional or digital marketing, you would have to pay a lot to ensure your target audience sees your campaign. But, with email marketing, you get to send your email marketing campaigns to thousands of people for a much cheaper price.
And if you are a small business with only a small list of subscribers, you can even start email marketing with a basic or free plan from different email service providers (ESPs).
Also, it's more cost-effective to create an email campaign as you don't have to invest in photoshoots, location fees, printers, mailing, etc. You would need a person to create the email copy and images for the email marketing campaign.
3. It can give a high return on investment (ROI)
A good marketing ROI is 5:1, and we saw earlier that email marketing could give an ROI of $51.52 for every $1 invested. It works so well in getting conversions because you can send targeted emails to your audience design at the right time when they are online.
By sending relevant emails at the right time, you increase the probability of them opening and clicking through your email. Also, nowadays, more people are using emails, so combined with the low platform cost, more people are converting as customers and a high ROI.
Related guide: How to Calculate and Improve Your Email Marketing ROI
4. You can see the impact of the campaign immediately
With most digital or traditional marketing campaigns, the aim is to create a general awareness around your brand/product and hope that it'll lead to sales later. It could be weeks after the marketing campaign launch, and you are not exactly able to determine if the sale was due to the campaign or some other reason.
That's not the case with email marketing, as you can track how much sales came from the campaign without waiting for weeks or months to see the results. The best part with email marketing is that you can track conversions and exactly how many sales came through it, which you can't do accurately with other channels.
When you know which campaign is successful, you can better understand what type works best for you and what doesn't. And, you can make changes to elements of your campaign like subject line, images, call to action, and A/B test them to see which does better.
5. With email marketing, you can collect first-party data
First-party data is any information about your customers you collect and own. And businesses usually get information about their subscriber's preferences and interests using surveys and forms.
Now, if you have conducted surveys before, you know how hard it can be to get your customers to fill out the survey. But, if you use email marketing, conducting surveys is easy as you can send every one of your customers the survey directly to their inbox.
And people who check their emails are more likely to open your survey and fill it out. So, you can get more information from your customers and take in their feedbacks to improve your product and strategy.
Now, you can also take it one step further by using AMP to create surveys that can be filled out in the email itself. It'll help you get a higher response rate on your surveys. How? Well, interactive surveys will encourage more people to fill out the form as it removes the obstacle of redirecting people to a different website.
You can see how this works in the example below:
You can use ESPs like Mailmodo, which supports AMP, to create interactive emails and reap its benefits.
You also have access to data on opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribe, etc., in the dashboard of your ESP. You don't have to depend on second or third-party sources to collect data on your prospects. And using this data, you can create targeted emails based on their interests.
6. You can create hyper-personalized campaigns
With email marketing, you can develop personalized emails for different audience segments.
"We've all heard the legend of its impressive ROI, but that's not the only reason why email is touted as a powerful marketing channel. Something that I've always appreciated and admired about marketing emails is the ability to add dynamic content. Customers like it when emails are customized for them.
"No one else is getting the email that shows everything they just browsed. That's just for them. As a marketer, being able to include dynamic content in emails gives teams the ability to create content that connects with each customer on an individual level. And dynamic content goes beyond just pulling in products. Using customer data like zip code, time zone, etc., brands can create emails that are hyper-personalized, without manual effort. Voila!"
~ Brooke Grief, Iterable
And you can also send emails to your audience based on their position in the marketing funnel and personalize it based on their browser activity or purchases. For example, you can send one email campaign to repeat customers and another different one to new customers.
You can use dynamic content to alter your campaign to suit its recipient with email marketing. With dynamic content, you don't have to waste time creating different campaigns for different audiences; rather, the content in the campaign changes.
7. You have control over who sees the campaign
Since you are the owner of your email list, you have complete control over who sees your email and who doesn't. You can specify who you want to send your campaign to and when. All your emails get delivered to your subscribers unless your email is considered spam or has illegal content.
Whereas in social media or other channels, you can only enter the characteristics of your target audience and hope the campaign gets shown to people.
And, with organic social media marketing, the reach is even worse as you are at the mercy of the platform and depend on them to get your message seen.
8. It helps you build better and lasting customer relationships
The main selling point for email marketing is that you can directly communicate with your audience to establish relationships with existing and future customers. They can reply to your emails which is not common with other marketing channels.
This is beneficial since it allows users another way to reach you if they have issues or concerns about your company. Rather than trying to find you on social media, people can search for your brand's name in their inbox. Then they can open your most recent email and click "Reply."
You encourage users to contact you with their questions by keeping this line of communication open. This will help you maintain the relationship, improve revenue, and lower your churn rate.
"I love that email is such a great relationship builder – there's no marketing channel that better allows to you create hyper-custom, timely experiences at scale while being respectful of the recipient's time and interest.
You can personalize your messages to every person on your list, populate their email with things that are relevant to them, and still be a responsive, good listener if they choose to respond. Email is such a great way to build a trusting, long-lasting relationship between your brand and your audience!"
~ Natalie Jackson, CBIZ
9. It helps generate traffic to your website
Using email marketing, you can promote pages on your website like blogs or landing pages through a CTA in the email and direct people to the site. When you direct people to your website, it'll increase the number of visitors to your site and help improve your SEO and boost your content ranking.
In the example below, Heyday has put together an email introducing their article on acne and breakout and gives value to their readers by telling them how they can prevent it.
Source: Reallygoodemails
10. You can utilize email marketing to nurture leads
Getting new leads can be challenging, so it's up to you to do what you can do to nurture them and turn them into paying customers.
You can send personalized emails to nurture them and move them further down the marketing funnel.
You may plan and set up a series of lead nurturing emails based on user activity.
Then, as soon as a new subscriber joins, they receive these emails.
For example, when a person signs up for your email list and downloads your ebook from your website, they will start getting drip emails to give them valuable information and motivate them to buy your product/service.
11. It can help you establish your brand reputation and build credibility
One of your ambitions as a business owner may be to be recognized as an expert in your field. When you send out a newsletter on your sector, you establish yourself as a thought leader and expert. To do that, you can send emails with relevant, helpful information, and your readers will believe you know what you're talking about.
In the example below, Shopify sends an email inviting a webinar useful for small business owners. They send out emails with information that is helpful for new e-commerce business owners to help them grow their business. This helps Shopify establish authority on being an expert in the e-commerce field.
Source: Reallygoodemails
12. You can boost sales with different email campaigns
You can send various types of campaigns, teasing an upcoming product launch, showing the BTS of upcoming projects, etc.
It will make your subscribers excited for what is about to come. This way, when the launch does come, you'll get many people raving about it as this is what they have been waiting for.
It helps aid the success of your launch or update and boost sales. You can use this during the holiday when you have new sales or product launches or in your general promotional email campaigns.
In the example below, look at how Hardgraft builds excitement through email marketing for their wooly cube product launch.
Source: Reallygoodemails
13. You can automate the email campaigns to save time
Now, you might feel that all these benefits sound fantastic, but you don't have time to keep sending campaigns by yourself to specific people. That's where the final advantage of email marketing comes into play. The entire process of email marketing can be completely automated.
You have to create the campaigns once, add your email list, connect with API and check if everything looks good. If it looks good, you can enable the automation feature in your ESP, and you are good to go.
You don't have to send anything manually, as the ESPs will send the campaign according to the API trigger to the people in your email list. This marketing automation system is particularly useful for welcome emails, abandoned cart emails, transactional emails, etc.
Related guide: Automate Your Email Campaigns Through Mailmodo Journey Builder
Get started with email marketing
Now that you know all the benefits of email marketing, all you have to do is get started. Select an ESP, upload your email list, create a campaign, and get started with email marketing.
Mailmodo makes it easy for you to get started with email marketing and helps you include AMP in your email strategy to build a successful campaign.
Sign up now!
