Some businesses today struggle to drive traffic, have low conversions and decreased sales, and miss the opportunity of conversing with customers. Although the success of every business is the combination of a few great practices, Email Marketing stands out. The power of Email Marketing cannot be overemphasized.
The reason why brands are fully embracing Email Marketing is because email marketing provides the best ROI in advertising. Email marketing helps to build credibility, boosts sales, helps for better brand recognition, increases traffic to website, it is targeted, and more.
What really is a successful business without these advantages in place? The goal of every business includes improving brand recognition, sales-boosting, high traffic, and credibility. This article is rich in information about Email Marketing – Why brands use it, whether or not it is still relevant in 2021, and Email Marketing practices you might want to bury – it covers them all. Keep reading this article to learn more.
Why do Businesses Use Email Marketing?
Businesses use Email Marketing for many reasons. Below, we have highlighted the top five reasons why businesses are turning to Email Marketing:
1. It Helps to Build Credibility
Emails with a shady subject line and from an unknown person can feel like spam. It just doesn’t feel right, and most times, readers just delete these emails. For most customers, a colorful design or an emoji will make them click and be excited. For some others, the same design and emoji will make them quickly search for the unsubscribe button.
For this reason, you must tailor your content according to the preferences of your readers. Understanding the interests and needs of your readers will get your emails read.
To help with this, you might want to create a permission-based email list with a checkbox for subscribers to opt-in to your mailing list. This ensures that subscribers know which emails they are signing up for and how often they will be getting emails from you.
2. It Boosts Sales
Promoting your business through Email Marketing gives your customers the chance to make purchases right from their laptops or phones. Email Marketing can be used to boost referrals, re-engage clients who haven’t bought from you in a while, sell prospects, and upsell to current customers.
The more targeted and relevant your email content is, the more likely the subscriber will take action.
3. Helps for Better Brand Recognition
Do you know if people recognize your brand? With the use of Email Marketing, you can quickly brand your emails. However, design isn’t all there’s when it comes to brand recognition. By consistently providing loveable content to your audience, they will not only recognize your email/brand but will also anticipate them.
With your emails, you can even get helpful feedback on your company. Would your customers like to learn something new? Are they excited about the content you provide? Start a discussion or use a survey to begin a discussion on social media. With this, you will know precisely how to provide useful content in your emails.
4. Increases Traffic to Website
Emails are a perfect way to draw customers to your website. You can add related links to your website within the content of your email. With email campaigns, you can also get customers to engage with other significant pieces of content on your blog or website.
For example, a local fashion school could send out emails to inform them about their latest design class with a very limited number of seats. Many of their potential leads and customers might have missed out on this opportunity to join the upcoming class if they had not visited your website in time.
With this, the fashion school can fill all seats faster by advertising the class through email as against waiting for reservations to ooze in.
5. Email Marketing is Targeted
When you run an advertisement in the newspaper or on television, you cannot control who sees your content. You select where to advertise based on the channel or publication’s target audience and hope their viewers and readers are interested.
However, with Email Marketing, you can section your email list based on location, demographics, lead status, and other data. With this, you can send targeted emails based on the interests and leads of your customers. You can also custom-make your emails for each customer, and this can lead to higher rates of conversion.
6. Using Templates That are not Mobile Friendly
The world has gone mobile. When subscribers check their emails in the morning, they are checking those mails from their phones, where most of them prefer to check their mails.
Emails that are not mobile-friendly are most likely increasing your bounce rate exponentially because of poor user experience. Because it is pretty easy to click away on something that isn’t appealing, emails that are optimized for mobile must be an essential step in the design process.
For companies using email automation software, you want to check the desktop previews and the mobile previews when drafting your email design. If the template being used looks plain ugly on mobile or interrupts comprehension, it might be the best idea to switch to something else.
Is Email Marketing Dead?
Email Marketing isn’t dead. However, a few Email Marketing practices are outdated and dead. These outdated practices include ignoring user experience, violating GDPR, not tracking metrics, and impersonal email address lines.
To help improve your Email Marketing ROI in 2021, we have highlighted a few practices to bury.
1. Ignoring GDPR Standards
GDPR is an acronym for General Data Protection Regulations. It ensures that the reader gives specific, explicit permission to receive marketing emails. Full compliance with GDPR ensures that sending marketing emails is legal.
It was created to help customers know that their data is protected and used by companies they have trusted their personal information with. They allow messages from brands they are interested in. this is good because it ensures that your email marketing messages are law compliant. It is also suitable for marketers, as it means that your email campaigns will be sent only to users who are honestly interested in your marketing emails.
2. Impersonal Subject Lines
Email Marketing begins even before the reader opens the email. Subject lines can make or mar open-rate – a metric that monitors how many subscribers open your emails.
A chief component of a successful campaign is aiming at the customer by producing content that identifies with their lifestyles. When it comes to Email Marketing, it starts with the subject line.
The art of personalizing marketing messages gives the readers the feeling of connection to what is being marketed. In general, personalizing a subject line can be as simple as asking a question to get readers thinking or noting the holiday season.
To make this easier, we recommend that you think about what in your email is the “must-know” takeaway and form a short subject line that taps into emotions to prompt subscribers to click.
3. Poor Email Design
Designing emails that delight readers are very crucial. Emails that have colorful visuals, bold CTAs, and quick loading time typically perform well. There are ways to add helpful information in emails without ignoring the user’s experience, and this is basically about visuals.
Consider this – an email newsletter with a couple of lines of exciting copy, a beautiful infographic, and an emoji in the title before an engaging CTA is pleasant to look at and read. An email newsletter with the same-old template, lengthy paragraphs, and an old-fashioned CTA is a tad boring, less exciting, and will most likely leave readers clicking out of that email.
4. Not Strategically Using Metrics
One thing that helps to fill in the gaps when looking at where to improve with marketing efforts is by tracking metrics. Metrics drive results to a large extent – they are the numbers behind the campaign.
Metrics collect data on when users are interacting with emails, how many people are, for how long, and who they are. This information is crucial to know when planning because they help in essential marketing decisions.
Is Email Marketing Effective in 2021?
Customers often want to receive promotional email. Email Marketing has continuously been one of the most effective and simplest ways of online marketing. However, one might be wondering if this method of marketing is still effective in 2021.
Yes, Email Marketing is still very effective in 2021. Email Marketing returned to its full strength after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak. As a large number of customers now prefer shopping online, businesses need to build strong relationships with their audiences through messaging.
For this reason, businesses must not only use Email Marketing superficially but must learn the best practices to help make the most of it.
Conclusion
Brands are wholly embracing Email Marketing because of its invaluable benefits. However, some marketers are not seeing results, not because Email Marketing is dead, but because of how they are Email Marketing. So, before you consider turning away from Email Marketing, plan ways to beef up your strategy to compete like we’ve highlighted in this article. We hope that this article helps you in taking your Email Marketing to a whole new level.