With so many digital channels currently available to marketing teams, we recently asked a sample of them which they used for regular customer communications. The winner? Email.
While email remains the king of communication between brands and their audience, it doesn’t come without its challenges. However, before we dive into the challenges of email, let’s cover the basics first.
What is email marketing?
Email marketing is merely one piece of the larger digital marketing puzzle. Email marketing is labeled king of the digital marketing channels for good reason, as it’s often seen as the channel with the highest return on investment.
What are some common challenges in email marketing?
As successful as email marketing is for marketing teams, it’s not perfect. There are quite a few challenges with email that marketing teams find themselves having to overcome, a few of which we’ve listed below.
1. Having inadequate tools
Different brands have different email needs, and, while some do just fine with free email providers or simple email marketing platforms, there are others that think their tools simply don’t cut it.
Between inadequate tools for email creation, insufficient staffing for email marketing teams, and the limitations of some email service providers, it’s time that brands research top-quality email marketing tools that provide their current staff with all they need
2. Increasing ROI
With email being the king of communication, more and more marketing teams are finding themselves stuck on how to increase their ROI when sending emails. One quick answer to this problem: automation.
Forty-one percent of marketing teams know that automation increases ROI; however, many don’t use it.
Automation can help your team not only save time, but it can also help increase lead generation, retain your current subscribers, and help contribute to the overall health and effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
3. Attaining and maintaining customer loyalty
When we asked our survey of small businesses about their goals for the upcoming year, one of the top goals was retaining customers, which fell just shy of attaining new ones.
The key to overcoming this challenge of email is to truly take the time to know who your ideal audience members are and what their needs are. Once you know, using marketing strategies like email personalization and loyalty programs are great ways to not only attain, but also maintain your customer base.
How to measure the success of your email marketing efforts
Measuring the success of your email marketing efforts is another excellent way to help your marketing team overcome the challenges of email. Monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) helps you see just how well each of your email campaigns perform. KPIs to watch include:
- Open rate
- Click rate
- Bounce rate
Does email marketing really matter?
Once your team has worked out the kinks and overcome their specific challenges with email, email marketing campaigns can help increase customer retention as well as ROI.
Will your challenges with email go away entirely? No—but, thanks to technology, these challenges can be dealt with efficiently, keeping your email marketing efforts running smoothly.
What now?
Now that we’ve addressed some of the fundamental challenges with email, why not dive into the top email marketing challenges of 2019? Knowing what these challenges are is only half the battle, which is why we take it a step further and discuss more solutions that can help marketing teams overcome these challenges.