Have You Embraced Email Marketing?
Let’s be upfront: Too many businesses still aren’t using email marketing. This is surprising as it’s a single access point that all adults have. Not everyone participates in social, not everyone gets their media from the same outlets.
Even though, as Direct Marketing Association reports, U.S. businesses can see an average 4,300% return on investment with email marketing. Or that Forrester Research found that companies that excel at lead nurturing (i.e., email marketing) can generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost.
Or as McKinsey found, email is 40X more effective at acquiring new customers than social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Email is like a little tap on the shoulder reminding someone you are there. Social is a passive commercial for the world, not specifically you.
With those kind of stats, why haven’t more organizations embraced email marketing?
Unfortunately, in today’s day-and-age, you can’t just send emails promoting your products. (Unless you’re like Apple or Groupon, which can get away with that.) You have to engage your customers personally. Show that you know them, and what they like. If you do, it pays off big time in terms of ROI. For example, Campaign Monitor found that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. Personalized emails deliver 6X higher transaction rates according to Experian.
Personalized emails means more than just putting someone’s name in the subject line. In fact, research has found using someone’s name marks you as a marketer. Instead, it means sending your customers emails on their birthdays — perhaps with a coupon for a free product or discount. It’s sending out emails with things your customers might be interested in, based on what they were searching for on your site. If you’re a nonprofit or charity, it’s showing people how their personal donations (not general donations) directly benefited someone.
All these things build loyalty, and make for great ROI. Segmented, targeted and personalized emails generate 58% of total business revenue from direct marketers, according to the DMA.
Email Marketing Trends for 2017
If you are making use of email marketing, what trends should you expect in 2017?
Email marketing should be optimized for mobile: Like most everything else on the internet, mobile is the future. Most people open their emails on their mobile device, and will delete the email if it doesn’t format correctly. That means, as Business to Business Community writes, “The content of the email … should be written with mobile users in mind. The subject line, the main copy, and the [call to action (CTA)] — all will need to be short, crisp and to the point. CTAs must be prominent and easy to click on the mobile device.”
Video will rule: Just like mobile, video is taking over the internet. This is nothing new either: Syndacast found that using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19 percent click-through rates by 65 percent and reduces unsubscribes by 26 percent. In fact, Syndacast predicts 74% of all internet traffic in 2017 will be video.
However, until recently, you couldn’t embed videos with an email itself. That’s changing as more and more email providers are starting to support playable videos right in an email. (For the email providers that don’t support video, they often support gifs. So in place of an embedded video, you can try linking a gif to a video on your website.)
Shorter Content, More Images: Don’t write novels in your email — nobody has time to read them. As Hatchback reports, “the ideal email length is between 50 to 125 words. That generated response rates of above 50%. Short — very short — subject lines of between 3 to 4 words also proved to deliver the highest response rate of 48%.”
Images will do the bulk of your work, but don’t just use any old picture you snapped from your camera. Many customers love aesthetically pleasing images (see Instagram), and anything that doesn’t look professional may turn people off from your email. But don’t forget to place alt-text on your images for those times when they don’t load. Hubspot points to BuzzFeed’s newsletter as a good alt-text example.
How will you incorporate email into your marketing campaign in the future? Let us know in the comments.