5 Circumstances In Which Email Marketing Is Essential For Your Marketing Strategy
Online marketing strategies often focus on social media, SEO and SEM. But this means that one of the most powerful marketing strategies is being neglected: e-mail marketing. Social Media, SEO and SEM are very valuable strategies to attract more visitors to your website. But when it comes to connecting with your audience, email marketing may be the best way.
The larger your mailing list is (so the more email addresses you have collected), the greater the effect. That’s why it’s often recommended to actively increase the number of registrations for your mailing list. But before you get into that, you probably want to know why you should use email marketing.
1. Attractive public
The purpose of a newsletter is no longer to ‘keep those on your list informed’. In the meantime, it has become a powerful marketing and sales channel, enabling your customers to get to know and trust your company. When the website visitors arrive for the first time, and don’t know your company yet, they are ‘cold’. They don’t know what your company has to offer, whether it can really help them with their problem and whether they can trust you. When they receive an e-mail every week for a longer period of time, showing that you can help them and even give them solutions, you build up trust.
This can make sure that when you make an offer, those on your mailing list are more willing to buy. For example, Unbounce’s Corey Dulley explains that at Unbounce, email marketing is responsible for 80-90% of visitors to their landing and sales pages. This is quite high, but it shows that email marketing can be very valuable.
Another way to get traffic to your landing page is to use paid ads. But why only use advertisements when you can also have a large group of potential customers with whom you have already built up a connection?
2. Your reach with email is greater than with social media
Many companies have started to embrace Social Media in recent years. For a long time it was a perfect way to create interaction with potential customers, in a cheap (free) way. Of course it took a lot of time, but you received a lot in return.
Unfortunately, it now takes a little more to reach potential customers organically (not paid). Even your followers, those who have already indicated that they find your company interesting and want to stay informed by ‘liking’ your company, won’t see all your posts by a long shot.
After an update of Facebook in the algorithm in 2016, less than 2% of your followers saw your posts. With the latest update of Facebook, this organic range has dropped even further. So it may well be that only 1% of your followers see your posts.
This also means that there will be less and less traffic from Facebook to your website. This article by Distilled shows how the number of visitors to their website that came from Facebook has been reduced enormously since the last update of Facebook.
Videos, especially live videos, will continue to perform well in terms of organic reach in 2018.
With email marketing, you can always reach most of your list. How much effect this will have depends on the size and quality of your list.
3. Your email list belongs to you
Facebook could remove your page tomorrow without reason, and other social media channels also have their own calendar. Even SEO is not certain. When Google changes its algorithm, and your hard-fought first place in the rankings falls to the third page (where no one ever comes), you still have your email list to pitch your services or products to.
E-mail marketing is a fairly certain form of marketing. Not everyone will open the mails, and there are always people who sign out, but with an email list of 1,000 people you can already see the difference in your sales.
4. It takes relatively little effort
With e-mail marketing you can use a so-called ‘sequence’. When someone signs up for your newsletter, they get a fixed series of emails. In this series they learn more about the background of the company, and they get solutions to their problem. Everyone who logs on will get the same series, regardless of when they log on. This is called an ‘automated sequence’.
These mails are written once and continue to work with every new login. That is why it takes little effort. You actually put part of your marketing on the autopilot. Where a blog post or social media post is posted and is gradually being forgotten, every new potential customer comes into contact with these e-mails. For this you need e-mail software. Examples include Mailchimp, Infusionsoft, and Convertkit.
5. E-mail marketing is relatively cheap
Although obtaining more registrations on your email list may require some paid advertisements, sending the emails over the long term costs relatively little. You have the cost of email marketing software, and the cost of the time it takes to write the emails. But you don’t have to pay an advertising fee every time you send an email. Especially if you use an automated sequence (see point 4), these costs are not significant. In addition, if you know that potential customers need at least five contact moments before buying a product or service, it is clear that email marketing can be a lot cheaper than advertising.
Until a few years ago, social media was also suitable for creating those different contact moments, but since the organic reach has dropped so much, you also have to use social media advertisements to generate sufficient reach.
There is a good chance that you are already using a newsletter for your company. With a few small adjustments you can get a lot more out of this, and use your weekly mailing as a marketing strategy!