Could email marketing help your business?

I am not trying to push email marketing over digital marketing, that would be foolish of me as most of our clients use digital. What I want to do is to explore the idea that email (snail mail) is a bit last century. I will let you into a secret – top marketers don’t think so.

Email Marketing Has Gone DIY

Marketing is evolving really quickly and it can be quite hard to keep up if it is not your speciality – why would you want it to be if you are busy running a business. However certain marketing tools, email marketing is one, have become more accessible to the general public and are no longer just the territory of the marketing professional.

You can DIY with software like MailChimp, Get Response, MailerLite, Active Campaign… the list goes on. MailChimp is the industry veteran and remains really popular but it has competition and you can find the software with the features that sit pretty with your business.

I like email marketing for two reasons: firstly I am a copywriter and an email gives me the space to really tell the story; secondly I have had some good results from email marketing, especially with fundraising conversions and member engagement in the charity sector.

What is Email Marketing

Simply put it is a way of staying in touch with your customers or potential customers through email to inform them of your services and promotions and a way for you to hopefully make a sale. I’d also like to add to this (the copywriter speaking again), it is a way of getting to know your customer base by telling them your story; a way of growing a relationship and of giving them a customer journey which is useful, whether you are selling a product, fundraising or growing a membership base.

5 Reasons for Trusting Email

The statistics say email is really effective

According to research the ROI on email marketing is about the best you can hope for. Open rates for a welcome email, the first one you write to a new lead, are 82% which knocks social media engagement out of the park.

The first promotional email was sent in the 1970s

The sheer scope of email

In 2019 there were 3.9 billion email users in the world (Statistica, 2020) and that number is growing with pace. Email usage is predicted to reach an astonishing 4.3 billion people in just three years time. Compare that, just for fun, with social media’s biggest player Facebook which announced it had 2.7 billion active users in its latest quarterly results.

Email is here to stay

Remember MySpace? No, nobody does. The speed of development of digital platforms has meant some have fallen by the wayside. The first promotional email was sent in the 1970s and email is still here and growing – that’s longevity. The demographics of digital platform users also ebbs and flows. Remember when Facebook was for young people and then us oldies caught on and teenagers wouldn’t be seen dead on it? Imagine if you spent time and money building followers on a digital platform and then the people you are targeting simply moved on to the next best thing. The big digital players like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are a pretty sure bet, they seem to have conquered the market, but it is worth working out if email should be complementing your digital platforms, just in case.

You can send a more targeted message

DIY email marketing software allows you to send different messages to different groups of your database – it’s called segmentation. A product or service rarely has one clearly defined potential customer with a singular reason for wanting that product. Emailing software allows you to give different messaging to different customers, basically you can tailor the same promotion to appeal to the needs and desires of different audiences. Digital platforms can potentially reach more people but its is rather catchall. As you can probably imagine, while it can be done simply, this segmentation business can get quite complicated.

Personal data security

There is growing suspicion of what digital platforms are doing with personal data and while that sorts itself out email is there to fall back on. Tough regulations limit who you can solicit with email and what you can do with their personal data, tricky for the marketer but comforting for consumers.

---

The Cons of DIY Email Marketing

Email is certainly not dead and a really useful marketing tool, but before you go ditching your digital bear this is mind:

1. Understanding and complying with strict regulations governing who you can send promotional emails too is very tricky. The rules surrounding General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR) and Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations (PECR) are a bit of a minefield. This is a whole other blog, coming soon, I promise.
2. It suits best those businesses which already have a database of customers.
3. Email marketing requires a lot of quality content creation, which is time consuming when you have a business to run.

If email marketing does sound like something your business would benefit from, but not something you want to DIY, then you are most welcome to check out Lime’s reasonably priced Email Marketing Package. We’d love to help.