How Companies Can Engage With Email Marketing
Email marketing isn't the most fashionable way for reaching out to your customers. Social media marketing, content marketing and brand humanization have all become far more prevalent buzzwords of late. There's a perception in certain quarters that emails are a major turnoff for the digitally savvy consumer. The demise of email marketing is predicted on a fairly regular basis.
A now infamous article in The Wall Street Journal heralded the end of email as far back as 2009. However, despite the ever-expanding range of communication options, the humble email continues to dominate the world of digital communications. According to The Radicati Group's Email Statistics Report for 2014, there were 4.12 billion email accounts in existence last year, with a total of 196.3 billion emails sent and received daily.
Email gives you an ideal opportunity to engage with customers and prospects, and evidence suggests that it's still highly effective. According to a Marketo report, 77 percent of consumers said they prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email, compared to just 5 percent for text messages and 4 percent for social media (Facebook). Email generated nearly twice the return on investment compared to other channels, yielding $40.56 for every dollar spent. The channel with the next highest ROI, search engine marketing, yielded $22.44.
It's true that many consumers are becoming adept at tuning out the "white noise" of marketing messages they have no interest in. We're all bombarded with advertisements, pitches and marketing information on a daily basis. In order to reach out to existing and potential customers, it's important to make sure your campaigns are targeted, relevant and engaging.
Effective Targeting
Your email list is your most important asset. How you build it will depend largely on where you're operating. In the European Union and Canada (where new anti-spam legislation came into effect in 2014), customers must opt in to receive commercial emails. In the U.S., direct marketing emails can be sent without an opt-in, but the CAN-SPAM Act does require an opt out and prohibits certain practices such as using misleading headers and subject lines.
