Email is not quite as exciting as it was back in the day. In the early 2000s, email still felt pretty fresh and new. Then, when we needed email to sign up for everything from social media accounts to shopping platforms, it became vital. Maybe it’s lost a little bit of its shine, but you may be surprised to discover that email is still top of the pile when it comes to marketing.
That’s right! We looked at the data and discovered that email is still number one. No channels are hitting the heights that email marketing can, and the data proves it.
The Case for Email as the Top Marketing Channel
So what does the data say exactly? It’s pretty exciting stuff:
- Email marketing is still up to 108% better for driving sales than social and display ad advertising. While this does not mean you should chuck out all of your other campaigns and focus exclusively on email, it does prove that email needs to be at the heart of your marketing strategy.
- Customers actively prefer to receive offers, incentives, rewards, and content via email. This is possibly because they find it easier to organise the offers and content they receive, keeping it separate from the social media channels they use for other purposes.
- Email is growing in effectiveness as a conversion tool. The data shows that half of consumers have converted following an email they’ve received over the past 12 months. This is a 9% increase in the figures from 2021.
Doing Email the Right Way
Of course, this is not the end of the story. Email may still be an effective marketing channel, but it’s also a noisy one. Around 333.2 billion emails were sent and received by businesses and customers every day in 2022. By the end of 2023, this is expected to reach 347.3 billion, surpassing 376 billion by 2025.
Also, all of us know how annoying emails can be. While we love getting emails from brands we are engaged with, we very quickly get disenchanted with sub-par communications, and our spam filters sometimes prevent us from seeing most of these emails at all. If this is the case for you, it’s definitely the case for your customers.
Personalising Your Email Marketing for Maximum Effect
What’s the answer here? How do we get around this issue? By getting personal. Let’s see how this is done.
Deliver Messaging Your Customers Want to See
What do all these spam emails — the ones that get deleted immediately — have in common? Irrelevance. They all involve offers, content, rewards, or promotions, that the customer is not interested in. Sure, you might catch the customer in a particularly receptive mood, and they might purchase something, but this is ineffective most of the time.
Instead, think about what your customers have engaged with in the past. What offers and content have they clicked on before? Which of your product listings have they viewed? This is automatically relevant content, and it’s far more likely that your customers will want to read it.
Hone Your Customer Profiles
You can’t just market en masse any more, sending out the same emails to your customer base. Instead, you need to be actively honing your customer profiles — understanding the different demographics you are marketing to and what they are interested in.
This has to come from zero-party data, i.e. data you have received directly from your customers. Buying data from third parties is insufficient and won’t give you the insight you really need. As you gather more data, you can make email marketing more efficient by creating specific content tailored to each profile.
Actively Engage Your Customers
Engage in progressive profiling — the process of developing a greater understanding of your audience over time. By progressively expanding your knowledge of your consumers, you stand a good chance of increasing your conversion rates on your next campaign.
But how do you do this? Through active engagement. It’s never been about trying to catch your customers out — tricking them into opening emails they aren’t interested in. Instead, it’s about giving your audience what they want. Reaching out to your users through direct communication and voluntary participation forms is the best way to understand precisely what this is.
Don’t Neglect Email in Your Future Campaigns
Email is here to stay, so make sure you are ready to provide your audience with communications they can engage with. Want to know more? Come and speak with our email marketing experts at Impressive! Contact us today to find out more about our email marketing strategists, and how we can help you achieve your goals.
