This blog is all about email marketing and marketing automation. I don’t know about you, but personally, I have so many different email accounts that I use for different things. My shopping email is FULL of different promotions and emails from all of the retail companies that I subscribe to. My professional email inbox is full of jobs various platforms think I should apply to. My school email is full of updates from the university and my other account sends me various club news. Read more to learn about the benefits to email marketing and how marketing automation and email marketing work together to create better overall marketing.
Why Email Marketing?
So why should you use email? Here’s a peak into what my email inbox looks like. You should use email because there are over 3.930 billion email users. By 2023, it is predicted for that figure to reach 4.371 billion users with a 3% growth rate per year. Still not convinced? According to the DMA Consumer Tracker, 95% of consumers check their email every day. When I check my shopping email daily, I have at least 10-15 new emails offering me promotions, free shipping, and all sorts of other things to try to get me to purchase something from their company. If all of these statistics still don’t convince you to use email, then you should know that it is a very cost-effective way to market your brand to a wider audience. This fact alone should definitely convince you.
Email allows for companies to show consumers what deals are available, and it also allows for a more personalized relationship between a brand and a consumer. It is more personal because you can tailor emails to include the person’s name or use remarketing tactics to show them an item that they have looked at before. Email is also a more consistent way of communication than something like social media because not everyone sees the ads posted on social media, but many people have email and users between the ages of 12-17 are using email more than Snapchat or Facebook. Email is also mobile, so it is accessible to many users.
Email Software
An email software allows you to send mass email messages and can track data such as who opened the email, who engaged with the email and more analytics like that. Email software like Mailchimp make it easy to design beautiful, personalized email campaigns. It also allows you to keep your store connected to your customers. Software also collects data on your customers so that you can better target them in the long run and optimize the way in which you are sending emails and the interaction that they receive.
Campaigns are more easily executed when using an email platform because consumers can use the platform to effectively use STP (segmenting, targeting, and positioning) to make sure that they target the correct audience with their campaign. Two email software programs available are Mailchimp and Constant Contact.
Mailchimp V.S. Constant Contact
Mail Chimp, an email marketing platform, makes it easy to design beautiful, personalized email campaigns. It is also free to make an account. Constant Contact is also an email marketing platform, but it also has a website platform as well. There is a free trial but after that, there will be a fee to use the service. Both are email marketing tools that make mass emailing simple and emails look elegant. Both allow you to track your performance of your emails in real-time with the ability to see when it was opened to if there were any other interactions within the email. Mailchimp allows you to segment your audience which is good for increasing the click-through rates and e-commerce orders the campaigns generate. For businesses that solely want to do email marketing, I think that Mailchimp would work for you especially if there are not many people with expertise in email marketing because it seems like an easy platform to use. For bigger businesses, Constant Contact may be the better route to go because that platform could also be where you manage your website.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation allows businesses to save time and money, measure and optimize marketing investments. According to Marketo, marketing automation is a “must have” for all modern marketing teams. The best practices of marketing automation are ones that encompass marketing campaigns across all channels. This includes:
· Email marketing
· Direct mail
· Landing pages and forms
· Social initiatives
Automation allows consumers to run campaigns across the entire customer lifecycle. Marketing automation allows leads to not die. It continues and nurtures them in a more personalized way until they reach the end goal. Marketing automation is best used to continue to nurture leads. In terms of email marketing, this could be sending a person a more specific and personalized email message about a product they seemed interested in. This continues the conversation between the brand and the customer until they potentially become a conversion without letting their lead die off.
Conclusion
Email marketing is extremely important in maintaining brand awareness with consumers and maintaining the relationships between consumers and the brand. Consistently using email to campaign will ultimately help your company because they will understand how to continue to track potential leads and see through the relationship with them until they become conversions. Email marketing is more important than I ever would have thought, so I hope this guide was able to teach you more about the importance of email marketing and marketing automation. See what I’m learning next in #wwudigimark with my next blog coming to you soon!