5 Reasons Why Email Marketing Should Be A Core Focus
Why Email Marketing?
Do you want to turn up your customers engagement another notch? You need an email marketing strategy that will nurture your audience on a deep level and leverage that to increase your sales. Email marketing has several advantages to social media, paid ads, and content marketing. It doesn’t take many Google searches to find out that email marketing gives back an average of $44 for every $1 spent or that it’s 40 times more effective than social media marketing and at least three times more effective than every other marketing channel.
We want to introduce you to the practical reasons that email marketing should be the focus of your marketing efforts and how to implement a strategy that will get people to open up, engage, and buy from you. The reality is that email is the one marketing tool that has important advantages in that you have complete control over messaging to your customers. This can be a key differentiator for your business’ growth and success.
Here are five reasons that we believe email marketing is your best bet to grow your business.
1. Email Builds the Best Relationships
One of the most important parts of building a brand is forming long-term, meaningful relationships with your customer or your target market. Crafting an effective email campaign can build long and sustained relationship for your brand. At the end of the day, the more that you show your audience that you understand them and that your message was tailored to them, the more likely they’re going to trust you. As will any relationship, trust, is one of the factors that determines whether someone’s going to buy from you or your competitors. Building these relationships through email marketing is what keep massive companies like Airbnb, Starbucks, and Disney growing year after year.
When your target customers feel a connection to your company, they tend to buy from you – again and again. Nurturing this relationship can build engagement with the customer and bring you decades worth of sales for your company. In fact, according to Sprout Social, 64% of consumers want brands to connect with them. Most people have a dislike for telemarketers and calling people on the phone often feels invasive. Using social media can feel too detached, email marketing offers an appropriately personal touch that no other platform can match.
Email marketing lets you approach your customers at the right moment, with the right message – and that message will be in their inbox, waiting for them to open your message to them. In fact, if you craft a message that that will help the customer understand how you can help solve their problem, they will be eager to sign-up for your email list to receive more of your solutions and offers.
The beauty of email marketing is you can build a list with specific segments that allows you to message people according to their past actions, interest, demographic, position in your sales funnel, and much more. This segmentation allows your email subscribers to feel like they’re on a personal journey with your business and brand.
2. Email Doesn’t Have Platform Gatekeeper
If you want to reach your audience on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or though paid ads; who do you have to go through?
On social media, you can build your audience and use paid social to build your brand. Oftentimes, to grow fast, you need to “pay-to-play” and follow constantly changing guidelines. Facebook rules on privacy and rules of engagement can often be a hurdle and if you misstep, then you can lose the privilege of engagement on that platform or even get your account suspended. Since social media platforms make money from selling businesses access to their target markets, they can intentionally decrease the potential for organic growth. Unfortunately, that means you must often pay to reach your audience and you must follow Facebook’s or LinkedIn rules, which seem to be getting more and more stringent.
Other potential sales channel also have their challenges. Google Ads, Bing Ads, YouTube, and every other advertising site have their own terms of service. This often causes your marketing efforts to increase in cost and you must be able to navigate these sales channel using their rules for their audience.
Why then is email marketing the answer to this?
Email has fewer gatekeepers to worry about. Usually, the only gatekeeper of email is the customers internet service provider and their spam filters. The second gatekeeper is the customers willingness to opt-in to your email list.
The customers internet service provider’s spam filters mostly pays attention to your sender reputation and the content of your email to make sure you’re not a spamming people. The key to avoiding spam filters is as simple as following some basic guidelines and use the correct tools to help you manage your email campaign.
Getting a customer to opt-in to your mailing list is not difficult provided you follow some basic rules and provide value to your customer. This includes a strong opt-in offer and to give more than you asked. As long as you provide good value and content for your list, they will be eager to see what you have for them in your latest email.
Not having a gatekeeper and having the freedom to build a nurturing relationship with your audience, makes email marketing a very powerful marketing tool to communicate with your target market. Some key benefits are that emailing your audience is far less expensive than running ads on other platforms to reach your target market. Also, the effort to send one email is essentially the same as sending 10,000 emails to your subscribers.
3. Other Social Platforms Redirect to Email
We must note that there are disadvantages to using social media and other content management platforms but all of them are important to the overall strategy of your marketing campaign. After all, your customers who subscribe to your email list and become leads for your offers must come from somewhere. If you look at any offers that you see on Google, Facebook, or business website, those companies are usually giving away something free in exchange for your email. Smart email marketers do this so they can identify what the target audience is interested in and get the customers email to build their list. Once the potential customer is on their email list, they can follow-up with special deals, valuable content, or share compelling stories to continue to build their brand. The best part of email marketing is that these companies do not have to ask anyone for permission or pay any fees to communicate with their email list… and neither do you!
That’s why all marketing roads end with follow-up of email marketing and getting your customers to sign up for your offers, content, and brandable goods. It is also why email should be the focus of any good marketing strategy.
4. Email is a Versatile Tool
Social Media and advertising platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Google are always trying to adapt and create new ways for advertisers to engage with their audiences. Facebook created groups to keep their audiences engaged. TikTok, Reels, and YouTube Shorts have built platforms to take advantage of our short attention span through short form video.
Some of those new features of these platforms are useful and efficient. Email marketing continues to be as versatile as you want without restrictions or adherence to the social platforms. Better yet, it’s the best engagement tool without having to pay for it. With email marketing, you can send your subscribers images, videos, text, or a link to a separate page with all three. With email marketing, you have virtually complete control over what content you send and to what target audience will best fit your message. In some respects, your email list is your very own advertising platform. You can send what you want and target who you want for free; as long as you take the time to build your list and nurture that relationship with your audience. Email marketing only gets more flexible and versatile as you collect more and more audience data.
5. Email Marketing is (Relatively) Easy to Implement
Email marketing is simple to implement but requires that right strategy and execution to make it work. As discussed, there are huge advantages in using email marketing as a focus of your marketing efforts. Here are some steps to implement to maximize the use of email in your marketing efforts.
Build your list – Start collecting emails from your clients and use an email provider. If you have trouble picking one out, we can help advise or provider this service for you.
Create an Irresistible offer – Russell Brunson stated, “if no one is signing up for your mailing list, you don’t have a good offer.” Make sure to encourage your audience to sign-up for your email with a great offer. The bigger your list the greater the opportunity.
Create a Funnel – You need to a sales funnel to make this work effectively and maximize your time. A website and social media campaign can provide credibility for your brand, but a sales funnel will direct the customer to the action you want them to take. Focus on one objective in the funnel will give you the maximum chance to get your customers to opt-in to your offer.
Decide how to segment your list – Once you have your email list going, it’s important to segment your list. Customers who opt in can be presented with offers but ensure that they are relatively complementary to others. They have opted into your brand and that last thing you want them to do is unsubscribe due to an unfocused campaign. Segmentation your delivery and your email service provider can be your best friend in helping you manage this.
Putting It All Together
Hopefully you have a better insight of how email marketing can help grow your audience, distinguish your brand, and target the right segment of your audience. There are very few gatekeepers that separate you from your audience when using email marketing. Remember, email marketing is just one tool, but it is a powerful marketing tool if employed correct with the right audience and right messaging. When combined with your other marketing strategies, you can build a true brand and increase your sales with the right email list.