No matter how big or small your business may be, you have to make careful decisions about where to spend your marketing budget. Ultimately, your goal is to invest in the areas that will offer you the highest return on your investment, and help you to reach the most potential customers. But without a crystal ball, knowing which channels will pay off can be a bit of a guessing game.
However, there’s one type of marketing that offers consistent results for business owners—email marketing. Here are 7 reasons that marketing with email is the best marketing investment for your business, as well as some tips on how to write an email that will help drive results.
Email Reaches a Bigger Audience
Social media is often touted as the way to market in today’s business world. Twitter boasts 255 million users, and Facebook has over 1 billion users. With numbers like that, it’s easy to see why marketers often turn to social media first. But did you know that, as of 2015, there were nearly 4.5 billion email accounts worldwide? Gmail alone reported over a billion monthly active users in 2016, with Outlook reporting 400 million active users and Microsoft email services reaching 360 million active users.
Anybody who is online is likely to have at least one email address. In fact, social media platforms require you to have an email address to sign up. In all, there are three times more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter accounts combined.
Your Message Is More Likely to Be Seen
Getting fans on Facebook is all well and good. But did you know that Facebook limits the number of times your posts appear on your followers’ newsfeeds? This is because they want to push businesses towards their paid advertising options. But as a result, only about 2% of your Facebook followers will even see your post. Marketing with email, on the other hand, is far more successful. Emails are properly delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox 90% of the time. So, if you share the same message via email and Facebook, it is 45 times more likely to be seen via email.
Additionally, people on your email address list have specifically asked to receive messages and marketing materials from you. This makes them stronger leads that are more likely to engage with your message than a group of passive Facebook followers—and far more likely than those who happen to see a paid Facebook ad for your business. Email marketing offers a higher average click-through rate than most social media marketing efforts.
If you want to ensure that the right people see your message, then email is the way to send it.
Email Is More Likely to Convert
Marketing is generally focused on driving conversions—turning potential customers into paying customers. And email marketing is one of the most successful methods of driving those conversions. The average click-through rate on a tweet is about 0.5%. But the average click-through rate for dynamic content via email is about 3%. If you did the math, that means you are 6 times more likely to get an interaction via email marketing than via Twitter.
But the people on your email address list don’t just click your links; they’re also more likely to buy. According to a survey conducted by Monetate, 4.24% of website visitors from an email address list will buy something from the site. Compare this number to only 2.49% of visitors from search engines, and a measly 0.59% from social media traffic.
As an added bonus, your results from marketing with email are highly measurable. There are many tools available that offer real-time access to metrics like clicks, social shares, open, bounces, forwards, and more. This data can help you to tweak your campaigns and create more dynamic content for email campaigns in the future. As you master how to write email content for your audience, you’ll see even greater success from your email marketing efforts.
Email Marketing Offers Higher ROI
We mentioned ROI once, but let’s get down to the numbers now. We’ve already established that email marketing has a broader and more accurate audience reach, has a higher average click-through rate, and is more likely to convert. Then it stands to reason that your ROI for this marketing channel would be higher than most others. But you might be surprised by just how high it is.
For every $1 that businesses invest in email marketing—from compiling an email address list to creating dynamic content for the email—the average return is an incredible $38. That’s an average ROI of 3,800%! Why is this number so incredibly high?
The ultimate success of email marketing comes down to the ability to deliver highly targeted messages to your customers. Other marketing channels send the same message out to everybody. Even with social media, all of your followers see the same status updates from your business, regardless of their location, purchase history, and interests. But email marketing allows you to offer hyper-targeted communications.
As you gather data for the customers on your email address list, you can create dynamic content and email them messages that are specific to their needs. Information like geographical location, gender, age, and purchase history can all influence how to write an email for that specific customer. The more targeted your messages, the higher your average click-through rate, and the higher your conversions and ROI.
People Prefer Email
Despite the focus that many marketers put on social media, most social media users view these platforms as a very personal form of communication. They want to use the platforms to stay in touch with friends and family, and to communicate with like-minded individuals. Because of this, many social media users have no desire to receive promotional materials via social media, and so they are unlikely to interact with that content at all.
Email, on the other hand, is seen as a more professional means of communication, and is the preferred method for customers to receive promotional content. According to a survey conducted by MarketingSherpa, 72% of people prefer to receive promotional materials via email, while only 17% prefer seeing the same content on social media. This is why it is much more common for consumers to add their information to an email address list than to follow a business on social media.
Because your consumers both want and expect to see promotional materials in their email inboxes, it is pivotal that you learn how to write email content and manage a successful email marketing campaign.
No Third Party Will Filter You Out
As mentioned previously, Facebook utilizes an algorithm that filters out a lot of business’s social media posts. The result is that 98% of your Facebook followers won’t see your latest update. Twitter, it appears, is moving in a similar direction, now using an algorithm-controlled feed as well. Because these platforms are owned and operated by a third party, they have the ability to filter out business’s posts as much as they deem fit, in order to push advertisers towards paid advertisements.
So, do you really want to invest hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars into building and sustaining a social media following, when 98% of them don’t see your posts?
Email, on the other hand, is an open platform. With a multitude of services providing access to the same kind of communication, no single company can apply sweeping changes that will keep your email address list subscribers from seeing your messages. Once you build a strong email address list, it is yours, and no third party can prevent you from providing your willing subscribers with dynamic content via email.
Email Is Here to Stay
While Facebook may be going strong, and may seem like it is going to stick around forever, people once thought the same thing about MySpace. But the website that was once the most visited website in the United States (with even more visitors than Google), is now a virtual ghost town. Imagine how much money you could waste if you invested all of your marketing efforts into a social media platform that was defunct a year or two later.
But email has been around since the 1970s, and has only continued to grow since then. Learning how to write email content and manage email campaigns is an investment that will continue to prove useful in the future. It is a long-term investment that offers a greater level of stability than any social media platform can provide.
So, if you must choose between building a social media following and building an email address list, build an email address list. If you’re faced with choosing between creating content for social media platforms and creating dynamic content for email, learn how to write the email. By and large, email marketing is the smart investment for your business.
Of course, a lot of business owners simply don’t have the time to invest into mastering email marketing. If you want to spend more time on your business, and less time worrying about your email marketing campaign, then contact us at Platinum Passports Marketing. Or email marketing experts can help you to create an email address list, and our content experts are masters at creating dynamic content for email. Contact us to learn more about our email marketing packages.
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