What Is Email Marketing? Five Reasons You Should Be Doing It

What Is Email Marketing?

It is likely that you will receive marketing mail through your postbox every week, advertising certain products or services. It may be in the form of a flyer, newsletter, catalog, or something similar. Email marketing targets merely email addresses instead of postal addresses.

Email has long been among the most popular forms of communication. You can send a message to many people in a fraction of the time, and at a fraction of the cost of traditional mail services. It is also more environmentally friendly.

What are the Five Effective Uses of Email Marketing?

There are many ways email marketing will be helpful to your business. Here are just five ways in which you can use email marketing to help your business grow:

Target New Customers

According to Lyfe Marketing, around 85% of retailers in the US believe that email marketing is the most effective form of new customer acquisition. Some companies specialize in collecting people’s email addresses for the specific purpose of selling them on to businesses that are interested in email marketing. Often, the companies will have information about the email address' owners, and in these cases, the email addresses can be extremely valuable.

The database of email addresses can be split into certain categories such as age, location, income, homeowners, car owners, pet owners, and more. Therefore, by understanding who your target audience is, you can easily access thousands or even tens of thousands potential new customers by purchasing one of these lists.

You can introduce your business, products, or services at the touch of a button and save yourself a small fortune on printing and postal costs. 

Transactional Emails

Sending an email to a customer to confirm a purchase is pretty standard with online retailers, but you can also use this email to provide information about other products and services you have. A quick link back to your website and their account will also be very convenient for them.

Most customers will also appreciate receiving order updates, so it’s good to let them know if the product has been shipped. A final email to check that they have received it and are happy with the product goes a long way in building a great relationship with the customer.

Newsletters

Another popular form of email marketing is employed for keeping in touch with your customers with a weekly or monthly newsletter. If you don’t do it already, start taking note of your customer's email addresses, even if you don’t have a massive online presence.

A regular newsletter can be employed for many purposes. Whether you just want to keep them up to date with company news, new product lines they may be interested in, or changes you are making. Not only does this make your customers feel more valued, but it also is a great idea just to remind them that you exist, in case they need you at any time. Keeping in touch with existing and previous customers will increase brand awareness, confidence, and loyalty.

Special Promotions

You can use email marketing to reach out to previous, existing, and potential new customers to make them aware of a special promotion you are running, even at late notice. Perhaps the email could inform them of a sale you have coming up in store or online, or it could include a special coupon for them to redeem within a specific date to encourage purchase or call-to-action sooner, rather than later.

Campaign Feedback

You can learn a lot from your customers by communicating with them via email as opposed to a postal, TV, or newspaper advertising campaign. In most cases, unless you have a specific call-to-action, there is literally no way of knowing how well your campaign performed, whether people responded well to it, engaged with it, or even looked at it, for that matter.

With email marketing, though, you can collect massively valuable data from each campaign. Some of the feedback that might interest you, for example, includes how many people read or opened the email, how many people clicked on something within the email, and whether that person bought something or not.

That means you get to know which email titles are the most engaging and what kind of content gets the best response. You can then use this knowledge to tailor future campaigns, ensuring you get the optimum results.

Email Marketing Pros and Cons

Pros

• Environment-friendly
• Inexpensive
• Better feedback data available

Cons

• Easily deleted
• Can be marked as ‘spam’

Summary

Unless you want to buy an email address database to target potential new customers, email marketing is straightforward and affordable for everyone. Various software is available to help you manage your email marketing campaigns, giving you a variety of options, such as automated sending, and will provide full feedback information for each campaign that you run.

Email marketing campaigns can help you with customer acquisition, brand awareness, and loyalty. So, what are you waiting for?