Examining Email Marketing In Digital Marketing
First, let’s gain an understanding of what email marketing in digital marketing is. Email marketing is a commercial channel used to deliver advertisements, offers, education, and other marketing content directly to the interested user’s email inbox. It is a segment of digital marketing that works in conjunction with other marketing channels. Next, we will take a look at how email works across these channels.
Some statistics…
Here are some statistics around the use of email marketing and how mobile is more popular now than ever. Email use continues to grow among companies and drive revenue with:
- 82% of B2B and B2C companies are using email marketing
- 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns
- 53% of all emails opened are on mobile devices
- 33% of emails opened are on iPhone devices.
Cross-channel marketing is very effective with email when other channels are used to qualify inbound leads and opt them into the email list, where they are nurtured and ultimately converted. Email marketing is typically the highest-converting single channel, if it’s well-targeted. Let’s look at the relationship between email and some of the channels it works well with:
Social Media
Email can work well with social media as you can use your different social channels to grow your subscribers’ list. On the other side, email can be used to promote sharing on social and grow your social fan base.
Display/Retargeting
The integration of email with display and retargeting has taken on a new marketing activity, email retargeting. Email retargeting is a simple and effective way to supplement an email marketing campaign with display advertising. Email retargeting works the same way as traditional site retargeting.
You target email subscribers rather than website visitors by placing a line of code in your email signature, or in the HTML of your email, and anyone who opens your email will be served ads all over the web. This is a particularly powerful way to keep your brand in front of your email list without sending more emails and risking mass unsubscribes.
SMS
SMS marketing and email marketing share important similarities that makes for a complimentary integration. Email and text messaging allows you to send the right message at the right time to all of your customers, while also offering two-way communication. SMS marketing can be used for short, time-sensitive communications while email can be used to follow up on texts and send more content and information to your customers.
Mobile App
With the rise of mobile and smart devices, people are now communicating and organizing their lives while they are on the go. Mobile apps have been developed specifically for email (e.g. Gmail, iCloud mail, mail.com). This makes email more accessible and a channel to be used to reach an audience anytime and anywhere.
Direct Mail
If you don’t have an online point of contact, direct mailers can be a good way to add offline contacts to your online database. Also, sending direct mail as well as email creates a seamless marketing effort from an audiences’ email inbox to their front door.
In-Store
Email can work with in-store marketing to build up subscribers. Instead of the old fashioned ways of collecting email addresses using paper forms, you use a point of sale (POS) system to collect email addresses at the checkout. Doing so makes it easier to track customer purchases, so you can send them tailored offers or content later.
Website
If you have a website and you have an email subscriber list, they need to be working together. Give your website visitors the opportunity to hear about upcoming events, fundraisers, or announcements by adding an email sign-up form to your website. Also, use email to draw your subscribers to your website for more information and content.
Geo-location Tracking
Finally, email integrates with geolocation tracking to record who reads your emails, when, from where, and on which device they do so. An email ‘header’ contains all the information required to track where it came from. It holds the footprint of each server the email travelled through, which in almost all cases leads us back to the city/town the email originated.
As you can see, email does not stand alone as an independent marketing channel, but integrates across multiple channels. Take advantage of this in your digital marketing strategies.
One size does not always fit all, the same goes for email. Your email recipients are not all the same, so you will need to send different marketing emails depending on the recipient. Here are some examples of marketing emails you could potentially send:
- The announcement email: when you are announcing your next webinar, event, or sale
- The product update: the latest features you have added to your product/service
- A newsletter: a summary of your latest blog posts
- An event invitation: an upcoming event you want to promote
- A social media update: help share your great posts on social media to your subscribers
- Internal updates: keeping your employees informed about the company.
It’s important to remember that you can’t just email anyone, you can only email people who have opted-in/subscribed to your email list. There are two types of opting-in/subscribing to a list which you can offer to users (It’s up to you which opt-in method you use for your list):
1.Single opt-in: The user submits their email on a form on your website and they are instantly subscribed to your email list. There is no confirmation required from the user.
2.Double opt-in: The user submits their email via a form on your website and a confirmation email is sent to the user prompting them to confirm that the email address is real and that they wish to subscribe to your list. If the confirmation email is ignored the user is not added to your list.
There are benefits to both forms of opt-ins:
The benefits of a single opt-in:
- Easy for the subscriber
- Fastest way to build a list
- Less lost email addresses; reduces wastage
- Less technology resources used; improves efficiency
The benefits of a double opt-in:
- Higher quality list growth; only customers who really want to be on the list will be added
- The opportunity to communicate with subscribers immediately creates an immediacy in your email campaign.
As defined previously, email marketing is a commercial channel used to deliver advertisements, offers, education, and other marketing content directly to an interested user’s email inbox. It is a channel used in inbound marketing, which places marketing material where it will be found by users looking for information on a relevant topic. Using email within inbound marketing is essentially inbound email marketing. It is permission-based and focuses on creating quality content, pulling people towards your company and product. By creating quality content that your customer is interested in, you will naturally attract inbound traffic.
So why use email? Here are some of the reasons email is so valuable in an inbound marketing campaign:
- Inbound email marketing in digital marketing targets specific buyers through customer relationship management rather than an outbound method of ‘fire and forgetting’ such as email blasting.
- Easier to personalize. Once you have a specific audience targeted, you can personalize each email by sending based on time zone, location, viewing habits, mobile device etc.
- Email marketing is a low-cost high-return channel for businesses of all sizes.
- Because of the cost savings, email is a preferred option for many businesses when conducting acquisition and retention campaigns. ROI is based on competing for the most qualified of targeted users.
- Email marketing is not a “pay to play” space and so is often cheap in terms of cost per lead and cost per conversion/cost per customer acquisition.
- With email marketing in digital marketing you can get fast, effective and measurable data that helps you to monitor your campaign statistics in real-time and watch how your customers respond.
Now tell us your own side of this story.
We would also like to hear what you feel about the topic we discussed today. Your feedback is very important to us. Feel free to drop your comments and recommendations. If you have a contrary opinion, you can drop that too.
You can also join our Facebook Page CRMNigeria for more updates. You can do that by clicking on the link or searching for our page on Facebook.
You can also join our WhatsApp Group Here.
Finding the right Long-tail Keywords? Start your journey here.