When you take inventory of your digital marketing portfolio, where do you put your email marketing? There has been a lot of discussion about email’s viability as a marketing tool, and it is understandably difficult to get a reading on how people are feeling toward it. As a baseline, identify how you, yourself, feel about receiving emails from companies. Do they interest you enough to click on them? Are you quick to unsubscribe to any and all promotional emails? Do you begrudgingly agree to receive emails when you register a product or create a profile with a business? However you feel, there are legions of people who stand with you.
It’s helpful to first understand how you and your colleagues feel about email marketing because much of those feelings are influenced by experience. Perhaps you’ve not had great success in the past, or the success that you did enjoy has begun to wane. Everyone’s experience being unique, it is understandable that opinions will also be diverse on the subject. Often, the best way to get a broader view of things to appeal to the data.
Email Marketing By The Numbers
At Gravitate One, we not only keep a weathered eye on the analytics of every campaign that we run but we pay attention to what the latest studies have to say about the fields in which we operate. With digital marketing becoming increasingly more essential to the success of a business, we know that a great portion of improvement is simply being aware of trends. So, how is email marketing trending?
- User Numbers Are Growing: It is projected that by 2023, more than half of the world’s population (4.3 billion people) will have an email account. Furthermore, some statistics put consumers’ daily usage at over 99%.
- ROI Is Also Growing: As of 2019, it was estimated that for every dollar spent on email marketing, a business could expect a return of about $42. That number will grow as the global user number increases.
- Newsletters Are Becoming More Important: Does your company send out a monthly newsletter? If not, you may want to consider it. Over 40% of B2B companies cite the newsletter as integral to their growth. That number increases for small to midsized businesses that reportedly owe over 80% of their consumer retention to newsletters.
- Open Rates Remain Strong: With nearly 74% of millennials reporting that they prefer contact from businesses by email, general open rates continue to hold steady at just over 20%﹘that’s one in five emails. Meanwhile 80% (4 out of 5) welcome emails get opened.
Improving Your Email Marketing
With numbers such as these, why is there a belief growing among coworkers and in board rooms that email marketing is dead? Obviously, it seems like there is viability to this method, but for some reason, some businesses have a harder time capitalizing on it than others. Luckily, there are a few tips that can help improve things. For Gravitate One (to say nothing of other Utah-based marketing firms), these tenets are gospel.
- Personalize Your Emails: This has as much to do with understanding how to use your email portal or CRM as anything else, but every email that goes out should have personalized subject lines or address the customer by name at least once in the email. Your email platform will likely be able to automate this process if you are able to keep your recipient list clearly labeled with first names, last names, and emails.
- Know Your Client Persona: One of the most important services Gravitate One offers is helping our clients understand their clients. So much of effective digital marketing is first, knowing who your products are meant to serve, and secondly, knowing who is more likely to open an email. If you make denture glue, for example, you won’t get a lot of luck sending emails to high school graduates.
- Be Consistent: There’s a delicate balance between sending emails regularly and sending emails intrusively. Your campaign analytics will help you find the sweet spot to know how often is too often to send emails. Again, a good Utah-based marketing firm like Gravitate One will help you determine this with confidence.
- Populate Your Recipient List Organically: While purchasing recipient lists could be considered somewhat taboo within respectable circles, sending bulk unsolicited emails has been deemed outright illegal by the United States government. When it comes to successful email marketing campaigns, put the work in early for a better ROI by growing your recipient list one person at a time.
Email marketing, despite what may be said about it in close-knit office circles, isn’t dead. In fact, as email continues to grow in importance on a global scale, this type of digital marketing will only become more essential to your business’s growth. If you have questions on how to jumpstart your reach within email marketing, call Gravitate One for a consultation today.