Whether you’re a business to business (B2B) company or a business to consumer (B2C) company, there’s power in e-mail even to this very day. Despite social media being a supergiant in terms of marketing, there is still potential for running a successful e-mail marketing campaign regardless of what kind of business you might run. Here are a few reasons e-mail marketing still matters.
People still check their inbox
Not everyone is sold on the idea of social media, especially if you’re within a particular age category such as 50+. However, one thing all audiences these days have in common is they check their e-mail’s inbox for the latest direct messages. According to research, the percentage of those who do use e-mail daily is higher than ever before, with numbers looking like they will only increase as the years pass. That means your message, whether it’s to inform about a new deal or to educate your customers with tips from your blog, will be seen and even engaged with at a higher level than you would on social media.
However you get your e-mail campaigns out to your customers, you have to do it with their permission first and foremost (for the record this applies to social media as well!). Otherwise, you could be looking at a sharp decrease in customer engagement and interest as opposed to an increase of it.
Personalization matters more than ever now
One thing that seems to get lost on the way to earning a bigger audience is the lack of personalization. With e-mail marketing, personalization can apply to almost anyone. Businesses can design the e-newsletters however best it fits their brand, while customers still have the choice of whether or not to follow through on the offers presented to them.
E-mail marketing also has a slight advantage over other means of reaching an audience given its simple yet effective formatting of text in messages…and that’s it. With social media presenting visual after visual, videos and GIFs swarming our phones, and so on, it can feel like you’re just being blasted with advertising you didn’t ask for. In contrast, a text-only message in an e-mail newsletter can come across to your customers as a personal invitation to interact with your business and brand.
This sense of personalization may be the key to ensuring your message is actually read by customers as opposed to filling an already bursting junk folder in the inbox. That’s why the content you need to create for e-mail marketing needs to be high-quality and not a cookie cutter message sent to everyone regardless of who they are, how old they are, what they like or don’t like, etc.
It’s less expensive to use
Here are some interesting facts about e-mail marketing in terms of costs:
- It costs you nothing to check your e-mail on your phone, whereas accepting a text message does incur a fee on your phone bill.
- Some e-mail marketing software allows you to send e-mails for free depending on the number of subscribers you have.
- E-mails and newsletters can be accessed across all devices, not just mobile, saving you time and money spent on making things mobile-friendly.
It’s customer-friendly
As effective as social media is when it comes to promoting and advertising your business online, there’s still a surprising number of people who are tired by these ads, according to a study. In contrast, the only way customers can take part in an e-mail marketing campaign and its offers is by willingly signing up for it—and according to even more research, e-mail wins in terms of click-through rates.
If you’d rather get to know your customers over time as opposed to blasting the same message over and over with little to no results, e-mail marketing is a great online strategy. However you decide to engage with your audience though, whether e-mail marketing or social media marketing, the basics remain the same:
- You need to not only create content regularly in order to create great e-mail marketing campaigns, you also need to make sure this content is high-quality, personalized, and customized according to your audience.
- You need to be as responsive as possible to the customer on the other side, whether on or offline.
- You need a website as the starting point for your marketing campaigns—all of them.
So before you get ahead of yourself in terms of creating e-mail marketing campaigns, make sure you’ve got a great website going. If that’s what you need to succeed, give us a call at V3 Media and we can help you get exactly that.