Email marketing is regarded as the holy grail of digital marketing.
If you do it right, tap into a small percentage of email users worldwide, use powerful lead magnets, create exceptional content, be consistent, and be smart, email marketing will be your biggest driver of traffic to your site and the top performing digital marketing strategy.
Perhaps you don’t believe any of this, especially with recent crusades that poise social media marketing as the top-performing internet marketing strategy, but studies point to the fact that email marketing is the most effective marketing tool – works among millennials too – with median ROI from email marketing reported to be as high as 122 percent – this is 4X higher than other popular marketing tactics.
The catch, however, is in your ability to plan and run successful email marketing campaigns, as well as your learning curve from tracking metrics and tweaking elements of your email marketing strategy.
Done right, email marketing campaigns yield immense benefits. As a smart blogger, you have to turn your focus on email marketing for the following reasons:
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1. More Social Shares and Traffic to Your Blog
Quicksprout reports that your blog content is likely to be shared actively on social media, not by people who come across your social media posts or social media followers, but your email subscribers – how likely? 3.9X more.
The high number of shares results in more traffic directed to your blog. The traffic will result in higher conversions, making email marketing the most powerful marketing tool for your blog.
All you need to capitalize on your subscriber’s ability to share your blog on social media is to create unique and valuable content on the blog, craft beautiful emails, and include a clear and compelling CTA to encourage those readers to act.
2. Your Customers Are Checking Their Emails Now (Every Day)
Whether you actively receive notifications on your smartphone or you check your emails in predetermined periods, we can all agree that we find ourselves checking our emails daily, even on Sundays.
While we avoid work emails after a specific time, we check our personal emails more times than we are willing to admit.
As a smart blogger, this means that every day, you have a window of opportunity to tell your customers/ subscribers about your new blog post, a sale or discount. We all love freebies or the chance to buy stuff at a bargain.
So, tap into this inherent and insatiable human need for freebies and price cuts to drive traffic to your blog and to convert those clicks into sales.
3. It’s affordable
A study done on the cost-effectiveness of email marketing by DBS Data revealed that you earn about $38 for every dollar spent on email marketing. I don’t know about you, but this is not something I’d be willing to pass on.
Email marketing also involves the use of your own unique channel for marketing, and you don’t have to comply with some (archaic) regulations on the marketing.
This promises a significantly high and attractive return on investment for those few minutes and dollars spent on your ESP or content creation.
4. You Send Personalized Emails
While we all check our emails all the time, none of us appreciates receiving an email that looks and smells generic, right?
Well, through segmentation and targeting of your audience, you give every email sent out a personal touch and your reader feels like you know them well – all because you researched your audience’s needs and used the data gathered to create personalized messages.
The personalized emails are attractive to readers, and they have a 26 percent higher open rate, as well as a 14 percent higher click-through rates compared to other emails.
And it’s real simple: add a first name field in the subject line and greeting, send content relevant to your leads’ purchase cycle stage, add region-specific information, incorporate a strong CTA, a personalized signature, and relevant personal events.
5. An Automated Sales Cycle
Automation is the other most attractive feature of email marketing. Through automation, you put your segmented audience list in use.
Note that segmentation allows the creation of highly specific subgroups that are highly targeted resulting in high click-through rates, open rates, and few unsubscribes.
So, how do you automate your sales cycle?
Using autoresponders: autoresponders are email marketing’s secret weapon, and also called a drip campaign because a series of emails get sent out automatically when triggered by an action like when someone hits download on your website or blog.
The autoresponders take time because all you have to do is curate an email and forget about it.
You only need to make sure that you send a follow-up email to ensure that the reader will always receive your emails in their private inbox.
Workflows: you can take your autoresponders to step further with workflows which will execute different actions based on set criteria.
The workflows are in a Yes/ No format and have two components, the enrollment criteria, and the goal.
6. Easy Tracking and it’s Measurable
Email marketing gives accurate information on the email’s open rate, whether they read it or not, the click-through rate and how many people unsubscribe to your emails.
These metrics will help you gauge the performance of your email marketing strategy, as well as the blog’s content creation strategy.
The results collected will help you tweak your copy and features of the email such as the subject line, types of offers given, and you could also tweak your targeting strategies. You can also use the results to reconfigure your blog content.
7. It Boosts Brand Awareness
You boost your brand’s awareness when someone subscribes to your blog.
And if they forward the email, someone else might subscribe to your blog widening your brand awareness. With brand awareness comes to brand recognition.
8. You Should Use Email Marketing to Build Your Credibility
People do business with brands they know of, like and trust.
This could be you too – keep your word, share great content as consistently as you promise and think of great ways of boosting relationship with your readers. As they say, it is all in the little things – make them count.
Finally, there isn’t much competition in email marketing – everyone is trying to make things work on social media, forgetting email.
