There are a handful of different digital channels marketers can use to reach customers. In today’s connected world, it seems your options are endless. Social media has become a favorite with marketers over the past several years, but email still remains the best bet for positive ROI and overall customer engagement.
There’s no denying the popularity of emails. According to Statista, there’ll be nearly 4 billion email users by the end of 2019—that’s about half of the world’s population. You can safely assume that your customers are using it.
Emails are a cost-effective and successful solution to run a personalized marketing campaign without a lot of manual work.
Save time by using automated journeys.
If you’re using an ESP, you likely have the ability to create automated journeys. Automated journeys are workflows that you create with a lead or a customer buyer journey in mind. Your contacts will receive emails based on specific actions, dates, segments, or events that you determine beforehand.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Setting up an automated journey does take time but, once it’s turned on, your emails send themselves. It’s important to note that you can’t set up your campaigns and forget about them. You should check the status of your campaigns and alter your journeys as needed.
Emails lets you get more personal with customers.
One of the big advantages of email is the ability to get more personal with your customers. After you build your automated journeys, you can create email list segments for each specific workflow. Segmentation helps you make sure you’re sending the right message to the right people at the right time.
Marketers have found a 760% increase in email revenue from segmented campaigns.
You can even take it a step further and add personalization and dynamic content to your emails to provide an even more human feel to your messaging.
How to measure the advantages of email
Marketers will commonly look at open and click-through rates to determine the success of their email campaigns. When comparing to other marketing channels, engagement and conversions will provide a good benchmark to see which are working best for your audience.
In most instances, email tends to have better engagement rates compared to other marketing activities. For instance, research shows that email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention by 81% and 80%, respectively. All other digital marketing channels were lower, including organic search, paid ads, and social media.
Does it really matter?
Email isn’t the only digital channel that’ll work to engage with your customers. In order to run the best digital marketing campaigns, you should know what works best for your audience, so you can communicate in a way that works best for them.
Social media, paid ads, and even print marketing can all be successful if you’ve optimized your campaigns correctly for your audience. But it’s important to note that email marketing is one of the few channels where you own your data and remain in complete control—unlike social media platforms that can go down or change their algorithm with no forewarning.
Ultimately though, the best way to build your digital marketing campaigns is by utilizing emails along with other channels to create a more comprehensive and personalized experience for your customers.
What now?
Now that you understand some of the advantages of emails, you can start strategizing the best way to implement an email marketing plan for your business.
Before you start, you need to take a step back and determine exactly what you hope to accomplish with your emails. Once you determine your goals, you can build campaigns aimed at those achievements. If your main goal is to add customers or boost revenue, you should also learn more about how you can use email marketing to increase sales for your brand.