Why Businesses Need Email Marketing to Grow
Email marketing is something that virtually every business does now. You may feel like email marketing is frowned upon because it’s “just spam” but that’s not true, and once you understand why businesses need email marketing, and how it can be done well, you’ll quickly start to appreciate the versatility of it.
Email marketing covers more than just sending out emails trying to sell things. When it’s done right, email marketing is a great way to stay in touch with your existing customers, to up-sell and cross-sell products and to build goodwill. Some examples of suitable email marketing include National Express – who send out emails with gifts such as free coach rides to their regular customers around the time of their birthdays, and Innocent Drinks – who have fun and educational newsletters that keep people thinking about their brands.
Now, if you’re wondering why businesses need email marketing – there are a few reasons. Firstly, email marketing covers a full spectrum of content and a lot of different customers, and it makes a lot of sense to reach those customers via email rather than just hoping they’ll engage with you in other ways.
Twitter feeds move incredibly quickly, and if you aren’t publishing tweets at around the time that your users are looking at Twitter, there’s a good chance you’ll get buried in their feed. That doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t a great source of marketing, but it does mean you can’t rely on it as your only source. It doesn’t take long to compose a Tweet, so it’s a low effort way of marketing – but the response rate per Tweet will likely be smaller than the response rate per email.
The same is true of Facebook. The lifespan of a Facebook post is longer than that of a Tweet, but it’s still not all that long – especially with the way that Facebook is changing who sees posts from pages. You will be limited in who will look at the posts, and if someone scrolls past a post the first time they see it, then the chances of them looking for it or seeing it again are slim. That’s why businesses need email marketing – it’s longer lasting, and there’s more chance of someone responding.
You need to get people to opt into your mailing lists, but once they’ve done that, you can expect that they will have at least some positive associations with your brand, and from there growing the connection gets a little easier. If you send someone an email, it will sit in their inbox until they are ready to do something with it. It might be that they will delete it unread – however, if you can write an engaging subject line then they might open it. If the content is appealing, then they’ll read it, and they’ll remember that it’s good – which means that the next time you send them an email, they’ll be more likely to open it.
After sending a few emails that are engaging, informative or funny, you can start to add marketing messages and build up to a sales pitch. They might need to see a few calls to action spread out over several emails, but the message will sink in that you sell whatever it is you sell, and from there it gets easier to seal the deal.
There’s another popular form of email marketing which involves reaching out to customers who have abandoned shopping carts partway through the checkout process. The idea is that if they don’t complete the transaction, you email them to ask them if everything was OK and offer them a small discount on whatever it is they were buying. Because they had already started the checkout process, it’s clear that they wanted the product. Often, that little nudge will get them to complete the transaction, and they’ll leave happy that they got a good deal.
Email marketing is something that is getting more and more regulated, and it’s essential that you take the time to learn the rules so that you don’t fall foul of spam laws. Even if what you’re doing is legal where you are, if you get caught by spam filters then your carefully crafted emails won’t be seen by your target customers, and that would be a shame. So, take the time to learn the rules so that you can keep on marketing and keep on growing your audience. You’ll be glad you did, and your customers will appreciate you running a positive and ethical mailing list. Your reputation online will increase, and you’ll have a stable of customers that will recommend you, share your emails, and hopefully become powerful brand advocates in their right. Start building your mailing list today!
