Pinnacle Group Ventures Marketing Services
E-mail marketing - use with caution
E-mail marketing is a great way to communicate with your customers.
- sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
- sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
- adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and
- sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet.
Researchers estimate that United States firms alone spent $2.81 Billion on e-mail marketing. This indicates that e-mail marketing is very inexpensive compared to other forms of advertising.
Advantages
E-mail marketing is popular for several reasons:
- A mailing list provides the ability to distribute information to a wide range of specific, potential customers at a relatively low cost.
- Compared to other media investments such as direct mail or printed, e-mail is less expensive.
- An exact can be tracked ("track to basket") and has proven to be high when done properly. E-mail marketing is often reported as second only to search marketing as the most effective online marketing tactic.
- The delivery time for an e-mail message is short (i.e., seconds or minutes) as compared to a mailed advertisement (i.e., one or more days).
- An advertiser is able to "push" the message to its audience, as opposed to website-based advertising, which relies on a customer to visit that website.
- E-mail messages are easy to track. An advertiser can track users via autoresponders, web bugs, unsubscribe requests, read receipts, etc. These mechanisms can be used to measure open rates, positive or negative responses, and to correlate sales with marketing.
- Advertisers can generate repeat business affordably and automatically.
- Advertisers can reach substantial numbers of e-mail subscribers who have opted in (i.e., consented) to receive e-mail communications on subjects of interest to them.
- Over half of Internet users check or send e-mail on a typical day.
- Specific types of interaction with messages can trigger (1) other messages to be delivered automatically, or (2) other events, such as updating the profile of the recipient to indicate a specific interest category.
- E-mail marketing is very green (i.e., "paper-free").
Disadvantages
Many companies use e-mail marketing to communicate with existing customers, but many other companies send unsolicited bulk e-mail, also known as spam .
Internet system administrators have always considered themselves responsible for dealing with "abuse of the net", but not "abuse on the net". That is, they will act quite vigorously against spam, but will leave issues such as libel or trademark infringement to the legal system. Most administrators possess a passionate dislike for spam, which they define as any unsolicited e-mail. Draconian measures—such as taking down a corporate website, with or without warning—are entirely normal responses to spamming. Typically, the terms of service in Internet companies' contracts permit such actions; therefore, the spammer often has no recourse.
It is frequently difficult for observers to distinguish between legitimate and spam e-mail marketing. First, spammers attempt to represent themselves as legitimate operators. Second, direct-marketing political groups such as the United States Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have pressured legislatures to legalize activities that some Internet operators consider to be spamming, such as the sending of "opt-out" unsolicited commercial e-mail. Third, the sheer volume of spam has led some users to mistake legitimate commercial e-mail for spam. This situation arises when a user receives e-mail from a mailing list to which he/she subscribes. Additional confusion arises when both legitimate and spam messages have a similar appearance, as when messages include HTML and graphics.
One effective technique used by established email marketing companies is to require what is known as the "double opt-in" method of requiring a potential recipient to manually confirm their request for information by clicking a unique link and entering a unique code identifier to confirm that the owner of the recipient email address has indeed requested the information. Responsible e-mail marketing and autoresponder companies use this double opt-in method to confirm each request before any information is sent out.
A report issued by the e-mail services company Return Path, e-mail deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers. According to the report, legitimate e-mail servers averaged a delivery rate of 56%; twenty percent of the messages were rejected, and eight percent were filtered.
Due to the volume of spam e-mail on the Internet, spam filters are essential to most users. Some marketers report that legitimate commercial e-mail messages frequently get caught and hidden by filters; however, it is somewhat less common for e-mail users to complain that spam filters block legitimate mail.
Opt-in e-mail advertising
Opt-in e-mail advertising, or permission marketing, is a method of advertising via e-mail where the recipient of the advertisement has consented to receive it. This method is one of several developed by marketers to eliminate the disadvantages of e-mail marketing.
Ideally, opt-in e-mail advertisements will be more personal and relevant to the consumer than untargeted advertisements.
A common example of permission marketing is a newsletter sent to an advertising firm's customers. Such newsletters inform customers of upcoming events or promotions, or new products. In this type of advertising, a company that wants to send a newsletter to their customers may ask them at the point of purchase if they would like to receive the newsletter.
With a foundation of opted-in contact information stored in their database, marketers can send out promotional materials automatically. They can also segment their promotions to specific market segments.
This can boost your sales significantly.
The Numbers:
1. Email marketing has a return on investment (ROI) of $42 for every $1 spent
Email marketing makes money. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42 . That’s a higher return than you can expect from most any other form of marketing — digital or otherwise.
While there are many benefits of email marketing for small business, ROI is the one that actually keeps you in business.
2. Billions of emails are sent every day
306 billion to be exact. And this number is expected to reach 361 billion by the end of 2024.
Even though there are more ways to reach customers than ever before, it’s clear that email is still one of the most popular modes of communication./p>
3. Email is used worldwide
According to Radicati’s 2020 Email Statistics report, email is used by over 4 billion people — over half of the world’s population.
And that number is only going up. It’s estimated that another half a billion people will be using email by 2024.
The simple truth is that your customers are actively using email. Make sure you are as well.
4. Email grows your business
According to 80 percent of professionals, email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention. In simple terms, that means more customers coming to you for their needs, and staying with you when needs arise again.
As the saying goes, “If you’re not growing, you’re dying.”
5. Email marketing is more likely to drive sales than social media marketing
Social media marketing is an important tool for growing your business, if a resilent strategy is used social media marketing can do very well, but it's harder than email marketing.
60 percent of consumers say they’ve made a purchase as the result of a marketing email they received/strong>.. Contrast that with the 12.5 percent of consumers who say they’d consider using the ‘buy’ button on social media, and it’s not much of a contest.
Social media is important, but ultimately, the gold standard of marketing still involves getting people to sign up for your email list./p>
6. Email helps you reach your customers as fast as possible
WWith the immediacy of social media, you might think it had overtaken email as the fastest way to reach new and current customers. But the truth is 21 percent of opened emails are opened within the very first hour of delivery .
By the end of hour three, that number jumps up to nearly 41 percent. /p>
The takeaway: Email is a fast and effective way to reach your audience.
7. Automation makes email marketing even smarter — and saves you a ton of time
One of the major benefits of email marketing is the ability to utilize automation. Simple automations — like sending an automatic welcome email when someone subscribes to your list, or an email reminder to finish shopping and check out to customers who abandoned their digital shopping carts — help you find and keep more customers.
30 percent of professionals surveyed said the biggest benefit of marketing automation was the time it saved them.
8. Consumers want to hear from you.
61 percent of consumers enjoy receiving promotional emails weekly. 38 percent would like emails to come even more frequently.
Keep this in mind the next time you’re fretting that customers will get turned off by sending emails too often.
9. Segmentation and personalization make email even more effective
Email marketing with a tool like Constant Contact allows for smarter, more effective marketing through email segmentation. With segmentation, you can send different content to different segments of your contact list to make your emails more personal and relevant to your readers.
Segmented emails make readers 50 percent more likely to click on a link within the email . And more clicks means more eyes on your website and online store, which means — you guessed it — more sales.
10. You’ll reach a mobile audience
Email open rates from mobile devices have grown by more than 100 percent since 2011. Smartphones are here to stay and are likely carried by the majority of your customers. Marketers are scrambling for ways to reach mobile users. Luckily, email marketing remains an easy and cost-effective option.
Today, mobile devices account for about 60 percent of email opens. Email helps you reach your customers where they are — on their phone.
Now that you’ve seen the email marketing statistics, what can email do for your business?
These email marketing statistics prove just how valuable email can be for your business. Whether you want to increase your number of customers or strengthen your relationship with existing customers, email marketing will give you the tools you need to do so.
