For those of you who have not included email marketing in your digital marketing strategy for the coming year, email is the most direct way to reach your audience.
When you compare social media engagement to emails, you will observe that there is a higher chance that people will subscribe to your email. Moreover, according to Campaign Monitor, a dollar spent on email marketing will return an average of $44.
Let’s dive into the statistics that prove how businesses have benefited from these strategies.
Increasing Business Profitability
If you want to increase sales and the ROI for your business, you need to talk about your business to your customers. You need to share information regarding the product or service you are selling, and keep them informed about the new products you are planning to introduce. Sharing information will boost sales of your products/services tremendously.
QIS Packaging, an Australia based company that sells paper bags, managed to increase its ROI by a whole 830 percent with email marketing. The company was running a successful business but never had they experienced such a sharp increase in ROI before dabbling with email marketing. They cleaned up their database and then started sending three promotional emails per week.
This promotional email campaign worked wonders for this company, proving that a simple promotional email with a discount can help you boost sales.
Developing Relationships
Conversations are essential to building relationships, which is true for businesses as well. Emails give your audience constant reminders of your brand. It not only helps you converse with your customer, but also helps you increase customer engagement. Various emails can help you nurture your relationship with the audience, and help it grow strong.
Retail businesses tend to send out a welcome email whenever a new customer signs up on their site. A newsletter helps keep your business at the top of their minds. Here’s an excellent welcome email example from Harvey Nicholas that sends out a personalized email with first name.
Evernote, through a series of onboarding emails, has shown how to nurture a new customer and build relationships. They have designed a simple yet effective series of communication. Evernote aimed to upgrade their free customers to premium, which they have successfully achieved with email marketing .
Knowing Your Customer Better
Emails help gain insights about your users, which in turn helps develop effective marketing strategies. The insights help you understand your customer better. You know what they come looking for on your website, and how they interact. A smart marketer will make use of these insights to create personalized, targeted emails that will help increase the conversion and improve retention.
A U.S. based self-storage units provider “Extra Space Storage” had been using a business-first approach when sending out emails. They were missing out on their customer conversion. They were experiencing a 45 percent no-show rate from prospects.
Secondly, some subscribers had no idea about self-storage process. So, the company decided to send out emails that would educate the subscribers, and help them achieve the ultimate goal of conversions.By working on customer pain points, the company saw a jump in the conversions by approximately 50 percent.
A few businesses send tips through emails to their customers, which is based on the insights. Here’s an example from Sephora.
Nurturing Leads
Email marketing helps capture new visitors, build credibility, strengthen the relationship and convert them into customers.
When a person visits your website, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will convert. You can only try to nurture them, and convert them. LV, an insurance provider, actually adopted a series of email marketing strategies to nurture leads, improve retention and build the brand. The company sent out a follow-up email within 24 hours of cart abandonment. They would send a thank you email to those who purchased insurance from their site. The results they achieved after changing their strategy were.
- 51.5% average monthly open rate
- 10.77% average conversion rate through emails
The total conversion observed for the company was 18.82% on an average . They also managed to increase their ROI substantially after re-strategizing their emails to nurture leads. They managed to earn £198.4 for every £1 they spent on email marketing
What’s New?
Are you planning to launch a new product or service? The best way to introduce it to your customer would be through emails. They may not convert directly, but it increases brand awareness. These emails would, in due time, lead to conversion. Check out this awesome email from Bose.
Dell had used email marketing while launching XPS12 Convertible Ultrabook. To make sure customers could experience what they were going to buy, the company created a GIF to explain how the tablet will convert into a laptop, which they included in the emails. Dell experienced a 6 percent increase in the open rate, and the overall conversion increased by 103 percent .
Reach People Anywhere
We live in a mobile dominated world. 54 percent of emails are now opened on mobile devices . It is thus important for you to optimize your email marketing for the mobile devices.
Arlington Promotional Products started designing email templates that are mobile optimized to reach their mobile audience. They reduced the number of images and text size to increase readability.
Wrap Up
Email marketing will become more relevant and beneficial to businesses in the coming years. A little enhancement in design and content will help you connect better with the audience. Emails will make use of emerging technologies such as AI and will use messaging apps for delivering the content.
Businesses need to optimize the emails for the mobile and wearable devices to reach people anywhere at any given time. From holidays to nurturing your leads to converting, email marketing is your go-to strategy. If you haven’t added it to your marketing strategy, now’s the time to do it!
AUTHOR BIO:
Kevin George is the head of marketing at EmailMonks – one of the fastest growing email design and coding companies, specializes in crafting beautiful emails, PSD to email templates and free HTML email templates. He loves gadgets, bikes, jazz, and breathes email marketing. He is a brand magician who loves to engage, share insights with fellow marketers. Feel free to connect with him on Twitter and LinkedIn.
