These days, you’d be hard-pressed to go almost anywhere on the internet without something popping up asking for your email address. Survey pages, popup forms, splash screens, comment sections, ticket submission forms, and even checkout sections are all asking for customers to enter their email addresses. It’s clear to see that businesses are constantly on the lookout for any opportunity to gather the email addresses of their website visitors and customers for the purpose of email marketing. Anyone who has started a business with an online presence needs to quickly prepare to start gathering email addresses from website visitors and customers.
Email marketing has long been considered as one of, if not the most powerful, ways for brands to promote their image, products, and services. These days, it’s almost impossible for a company to get by without using email marketing of some kind. Here are some of the many benefits that this marketing channel can have for your business.
- You are in Control
When businesses use email marketing as the primary method of approaching potential and existing customers, they tend to have more control over their marketing strategies overall. For example, ads on top of search result pages or on relevant websites can be useful, but you are still heavily relying on the visitor to even notice the ad at all. Compare this with email, where almost everybody with an email address is going to be checking their inbox on a regular basis. When you use email marketing, you can be guaranteed that the message you have sent to your customer or potential lead will be seen in the near future.
- It’s Cost-Effective
Email marketing is one of the most powerful forms of online marketing available and compared to many other methods of online marketing. It also happens to be really cost-effective. You can even send marketing emails for free using a free email provider, or if you only have a small contact list to send messages to, you can find many email marketing platforms that offer a free plan with a wide range of features to take advantage of. But even if you are marketing to a huge customer list, the cost for a good email marketing platform can be quite nominal compared to marketing channels like PPC or website ads.
- Personalize Marketing
Today, there is no shortage of email marketing platform options that allow you to easily send tailored and personalized content to your customers. You can use an app like Piesync to sync existing customer contacts from Mailchimp to Outlook, creating a list that is separate to recipients who have signed up via a website opt-in form, for example, so that each group of customers receives content that is relevant to their current position in the customer journey. You can also use their blog for information on choosing email marketing platforms and integrating them with various other software programs and apps you use to make the most of the features available.
- It’s Convenient for Customers
These days, everybody has an email app on their phone – so keeping in touch with your customers via email is not only easy for your business but also much more convenient for your customers compared to other methods of communication such as telephone or direct mail. For example, if you run an online store and want to send customers who’ve made a certain number of purchases from you in the last month a discount code to say thank you for their loyalty, you can easily do this by segmenting these customers into a list in your email marketing software – and they can easily save the email for future use.
- Track Results
Modern email marketing means that your campaigns are now much easier to track than ever before. The majority of email marketing platforms available today include a wide range of options for tracking the performance of your campaigns in real-time, allowing you to make adjustments and changes as needed in order to ensure that your emails are having the intended impact on your recipients. You can access your dashboard at any point to determine which emails are getting the most engagement, which are driving sales the best compared to others, and which aren’t being opened or being sent to spam – helping you get a clearer picture of what’s working and what isn’t when it comes to your campaign.
- Easy to Share
Another great reason your business should be using email marketing is that it can be a great way to promote word of mouth marketing among your customers. Imagine you send out an email marketing campaign – you can’t expect everybody to be interested in the information that you send them, but chances are that some of your recipients will know somebody else who is. And, your marketing email can easily be forwarded to a friend with just a couple of clicks, allowing you to broaden your reach and increase your customer base even further.
- You Can Share More Content
Compared to other methods of marketing like PPC ads or banner ads on websites, email gives you the chance to share a lot more content with your customers. Other methods of advertising tend to provide you with a very limited amount of space in which you’ll need to take on the challenging task of getting your message across with only a handful of words and images, which takes a lot of skill. On the other hand, you’re free to include as much as you want in your email – whether that’s images, videos, articles, or links. Of course, you don’t want to overwhelm your customers with an email that is pages-long, but you don’t have the same restrictions as you often would with other popular online marketing methods.
Email marketing has proven itself to be one of the most powerful options for advertising your business time and time again. If your business hasn’t yet harnessed the power of email marketing, these are just some of the reasons why it’s time to start.
