Email marketing may be old, but it is not stale. In fact, researchers and marketers find that email marketing is on the rise and predict that this trend will only accelerate in 2016.
Many speculated that the past eight years’ surge of social media would be the end of email marketing. Social media is real-time and it encourages a two-way engagement between a company and a consumer. This was so new to the world and created such a hype that many thought it was going to be the new “email killer”.
However, email marketing seems to firmly stand its ground. In fact, it has a consistently higher return-on-investment (ROI) over social media – and over any other marketing channel for that matter. (A high ROI means that you gain more than you spend on an investment).
Email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping a business acquire new customers.
McKinsey, 2014
For every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment.
Direct Marketing Association (DMA)
In other words, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective ways to get your message across to your market. With its measurability and directness, it is still a leading channel in your marketing mix and it is far from being outdated just yet.
And why is this? Why does email marketing outperform all other marketing tactics in terms of return-on-investment?
6 reasons why email marketing is so effective
1. Wide reach
Marketing messages in emails have a better chance of reaching intended recipients than in other channels.
Email marketing messages have on average a 90% deliverability. This means that 90% of sent emails reach the intended recipient’s inbox.
In comparison, on Facebook, only 3% of your intended recipients see your posts in their feed, according to a 2015 study. This is because Facebook is increasingly limiting organic reach in favor of driving brands toward paid ads.
Organic reach in social media is predicted to reach 0% soon. And even before that happens, it is pretty safe to say that a marketing email has a better chance of being seen by your recipients than a social post.
2. It’s direct
Once you have gotten an email into your customer’s inbox, it just sits there, waiting to get noticed. No algorithm decides if it shows or not. It doesn’t go anywhere. The owner of the inbox has to do something about it – either open it, delete it, or at least glance over it along with other unread emails.
So you can be pretty sure that the recipient will at least read the subject line.
3. People prefer email for business communication
Part of the reason why email marketing is so effective may be that it’s a natural channel for people to talk with businesses in.
Over the years we have gotten used to getting support requests, order confirmations, and purchase updates from companies in our inboxes. These emails are necessary and often bear a positive value to us (yay, my new Kindle will be delivered soon!).
When we are used to getting email from a company, the jump from a transactional message to a marketing message is smaller, and we get more receptive.
4. It’s easy to get relevant
With email marketing, you have full control of targeting. This means you’ll have a better chance of offering content that is relevant to the recipient.
With SuperOffice CRM system you have a database chock full of ready-to-use customer data. Every time you interact with a company, you create new data that can serve as a criterion for a mailing list.
So, before you create a mailing, you can slice and dice your contact list any way you want. First, you group people with specific interests and needs in common, using selections in SuperOffice. Then, you adapt your messaging to each group so that everyone gets a message they are likely to respond to.
5. Email is easy to measure
For every mailing you send out, you can track your delivery rate, open rate, and the number of click-throughs. From there you can figure out how much you are making as a result of your email traffic. This number is a great one to put in front of your CEO to show how much you as a marketer are contributing to the company.
A great side-effect of measuring email performance is that you learn what topics your customers like and dislike. You can use this insight to sharpen your angles for new articles and to target your campaigns even better.
6. You own it
While social media reach is declining, many companies begin to see the downside of basing their marketing efforts on “rented land”. Since social media own their platforms and their algorithms, they have all powers to make disruptive changes in your reach. And social media corporations might even go out of business.
With email marketing, you are much safer. You own your email list, and no one can take it away from you, as no-one owns email! This means that distribution algorithms can’t change overnight to render your list useless.
Therefore, despite the many predicted “email killers”, no one can decide to put email out of business. This means that you can rely on reaping from the effort you’ve put into building a mailing list for years to come. You won’t risk losing your harvest because someone decided so.
Of course, you still have to earn a good reputation among internet service providers (ISPs) to get your emails through to inboxes. And your users need to grant you permission to send to them.
But email marketing is still a lot safer than building large audiences in channels entirely owned by corporations.
Then why isn’t everyone doing it?
No matter the obvious benefits, there are marketers out there who are not putting email marketing to full use.
If you are one of those, then what are your hurdles? Maybe you think it sounds like too much work. Maybe you think that you don’t have the time, the energy, or the resources. We all have to prioritize, and when prioritizing, more often than not, the easier tasks wins.
Or perhaps you are just held back by the lack of a good email marketing tool?
Your tool can hold you back
While free email marketing tools are great in many ways, especially when it comes to usability, they also have their limitations.
A downside can be that free email tools often come with poor analysis options. Most often, you will only see your customer’s email address in the results, as opposed to the name, company, and location. Free tools have limitations for a reason.
And if you are using Outlook or Gmail to send your newsletters, it gets worse.
These tools don’t contain any measurement tools whatsoever. You won’t even know if any of your recipients have looked at your emails! This means you won’t know what works for your audience, and you may waste a lot of time and effort.
Why a professional email marketing tool is better than your everyday email client
So what are my options?
1. Our professional email marketing tool that works seamlessly with SuperOffice CRM
With an email marketing tool that integrates with your CRM system, you’ll get incredibly valuable data of how people are interacting with your content. And, more importantly, you'll know who are doing it.
The benefits of a CRM-integrated email marketing tool are plenty:
- You’ll know exactly what works and what doesn’t for your audience. You’ll see how many people have received, opened, and clicked on each link the minute they do it.
- You don’t need to maintain email list spreadsheets anymore. You can create target lists in your customer database and use them directly as address lists for your marketing mailings.
- You will be able to look up a person and see the full communication history in your CRM. You get a list of all the mailings each person has received, and if they have opened it or not.
- It will even be easier to follow up on customer response. With the mailings tool in the SuperOffice Marketing user plan, you can set up links to perform automatic actions in your CRM system. So when people click on your links, it can do automatic actions, such as:
- add a notification in the diary of a salesperson
- add the person to a specific project
- update an interest
If you already have the SuperOffice Marketing user plan/our e-marketing tool and want to brush up on your skills, you can browse this section to learn the essentials of SuperOffice Marketing.
2. Our simple, built-in mailings tool (for users on version 8)
If you just want to dip your toes into mass mailings, and can do without measuring performance, for now, you can try our simple tool for mass mailings, built right into SuperOffice. This tool is available for all users on version 8.
How do I get started with a professional email marketing tool?
You now know how important email marketing can be, and how it can help you communicate with your customers.
And as the mailings tool in the SuperOffice Marketing user plan works seamlessly with your existing database, there's no huge database imports or database cleansing required! Now, how good is that?
So what are you waiting for?