Does Email Marketing STILL Work?
“Email may be an old tactic, but it remains a vital one” (Mullen and Daniels, 2011).
Email marketing is a type of direct digital marketing that uses electronic mail as the marketing communication delivery method. Email marketing is used by organizations and marketers for brand and customer loyalty building, acquiring or converting customers, company advertisements, or to promote offers. (Lewis, 2002)
Are you still unsure about Email Marketing? Or maybe want help on implementing Email Marketing?
Firstly Email marketing isn’t something marketers do just because it’s easy, many believe it does make your company grow.
These are the top reasons to show any company that email marketing is still worthwhile.
- Wide Reach
There are over 3.2 billion email accounts today, 95% of online consumers use email and 91% check their email account at least once a day (Salesforce Marketing Cloud, 2015). Therefore reducing competition because other methods struggle to reach a large range of potential customers in one go (Jenkins, 2009).
Do you ever hear someone say they are going to delete their email accounts for good? NO. Therefore this method will be used for a very long period of time…
This email marketing example shown below reached a large quantity of people by emerging Pinterest and twitter together. So that the customers created awareness for the particular brand. This method generated an additional $20,000 revenue in one month time for the Colonial Candle Company (Widerfunnel.com, 2015). This was mainly due to the email marketing campaign reaching potential customers and entering new markets.
- Better than social Media?
Email marketing can reach a wide audience in a short period of time and allows recipients to immediately act on messages. It is very different to how social media targets people (Groves, 2012).
According to ReturnPath, they exposed that in the first half of 2013: 18% of all email messages were either blocked or went missing and 4% were delivered to the spam or junk folder (Path, 2015).
Even if 22% emails get lost, there is still a much higher potential than posting on Facebook where 74% of your messages are potentially missed. Although this is based on average statistics, particular accounts may vary.
- Measureable:
Email marketing is measureable unlike other alternatives, through open-up, click-through and conversion rates to evaluate success of campaigns. This data is useful for marketers as they can use this to alter strategies and improve results (Mullen and Daniels, 2009).
The ‘Miss Guided’ fashion company found a 20% increase in website views, a result of the discount they offered on their email marketing campaign (MissGuided, 2015).
- Increase brand loyalty
This can create awareness of your brand. Especially for a new business; it can create loyalty with customers and form new relationships. Why not check out this academic article; showing the impact of e-mail marketing on brand loyalty?
- Life span
Email has the longest life span in comparison to messages on Facebook and Twitter. A tweet is so short its popularity is predicted in the first couple of minutes (O’Reilly and Milstein, 2009). Whereas an email will stay in an inbox until it has actively been deleted.
- Integration
There is an opportunity to link Email and social media together, this video will explain how there are potential connections and opportunities for growth.
- Personalisation
Email can send a single piece of content to thousands of people and still be able to involve personalization. With the help of “segmentation” it allows you to separate people into sub groups so that highly targeted messages reach specific people (Lewis, 2002).
Let’s remind ourselves that email is one of the only methods that remains private.
Want to learn more?
Why not check out this interesting journal: An evaluation of e-mail marketing and factors affecting response, through this link here! http://bit.ly/1FrYL1V
This has book has been rated a “Top read” by the Guardian on Email Marketing. “The truth about email marketing, by Jenkins.”
Do you want to Tweet about this topic?
TWEET: “Did you know there are over 3.2 billion email accounts today?”
TWEET: “who agrees Email Marketing is better than Social Media Marketing?”
Also find ‘#bbsdigmarket’ for similar useful blogs and tweets.
(Mullen, 2014)
References
Groves, E. (2009). The Constant Contact guide to email marketing. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley.
Jenkins, S. (2009). The truth about email marketing. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: FT Press.
Lewis, H. (2002). Effective e-mail marketing. New York: AMACOM.
Marko Merisavo, Mika Raulas, (2004) “The impact of e‐mail marketing on brand loyalty”, Journal of Product & Brand Management, Vol. 13 Iss: 7, pp.498 – 505
Missguided.co.uk, (2015). Shop The Campaign Missguided. [online] Available at: http://www.missguided.co.uk/clothing/category/shop-the-tv-ad [Accessed 16 Mar. 2015].
Mullen, J. and Daniels, D. (2009). Email marketing. Indianapolis, Ind.: Wiley Pub.
O’Reilly, T. and Milstein, S. (2009). The Twitter book. Beijing: O’Reilly.
Path, R. (2015). Billions of Opt-in Email Messages Never Reach Consumers, Return Path Study Finds | Return Path. [online] Blog.returnpath.com. Available at: http://blog.returnpath.com/blog/return-path-2/billions-of-opt-in-email-messages-never-reach-consumers-return-path-study-finds [Accessed 16 Mar. 2015].
Salesforce Marketing Cloud, (2015). Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Digital Marketing Software – Email Marketing, Social Media, & Mobile Marketing. [online] Available at: http://www.exacttarget.com/ [Accessed 16 Mar. 2015].
Widerfunnel.com, (2015). WiderFunnel Marketing Conversion Optimization – Katie Fernands | Colonial Candle. [online] Available at: http://www.widerfunnel.com/katie-fernands-colonial-candle [Accessed 16 Mar. 2015].
#bbsdigmarket