Just because you’re not seeing the returns on email that you’d like to, doesn’t mean that email marketing is dead. Is it harder to grab your reader’s attention? Yes. But all signs point to email still being a key method of maintaining relevant conversations with your customers. If those conversations aren’t happening for you or you’re not seeing the conversion rates you’d like, it’s time to do some email CPR.
Not Dead Yet
First and foremost, email continues to drive sales. According to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud 2015 State of Marketing Report, 73% of marketers agree that email marketing is core to their business. 60% claim that it’s an essential enabler of products and services, versus 42% of marketers in 2014. And 20% say that email is directly linked to their business’ primary revenue source.
Add to this the fact that way more people are active on email than are active of any other channel, including Facebook and Twitter combined. According to the Radicati Group, a leading technology market research firm, there were 4.1 billion email accounts worldwide as of 2014, and that’s supposed to grow to 5.2 by the end of 2018. The total number of email users is increasing too, from over 2.5 billion in 2014 to 2.8 billion in 2014. Compare that to Facebook’s 1.35 billion active users (Statista) and Twitter’s 288 million users (Statista). Not too shabby, Email!
Beyond statistics, email is also important because it’s one of the few channels that still gives you a large degree of control over your reach and your brand. You have control over your own list and over, by and large, who sees your emails. There’s no organic drop. On top of that, you have absolute control over the creative, over the look and feel of your email and how your brand is portrayed.
In addition, email offers a unique opportunity to provide customized experiences for your clients. You can personalize emails to make them feel like one-of-a-kind conversations. And you can direct them to very specific niches within your email list with segmentation.
Email CPR
Now that we’re on the same page about email marketing’s value, let’s look at where the real problem might lie. That’s right. With your emails.
Gone are the days of email blasts with their one-way flow of untargeted information. The digital environment has changed, and your email needs to change with it.
Here are a few ways to breathe new life into your email marketing:
• Keep your content relevant and engaging. Data from Marketing Cloud shows that marketers rank the 3 most effective aspects of an email as email content and design (66%), templates (59%), and quality control (58%). You want to make sure your emails look like they were written by a human being, that they’re timely and that they include useful information for the specific audience for that specific email.
• Use data smarter. Use it to personalize and segment your emails more. This goes with our point above, since you’ll be able to write better content that speaks to your subscribers individually, not as a demographic. Personalizing and getting the right emails to the right people via segmentation is an important way to ensure that you’re creating conversations that respond to your customers’ needs.
• Go responsive. More than half of all emails are now opened on mobile devices. In order for your content to do its work, it’s got to be able to be read on a mobile device.
• Deliver on what you promise. That goes from your hook and getting people to sign up for emails, on down to your subject lines and preheaders that communicate what’s in the body of each and every email.
Check out a few of our other posts on email marketing for more great ways to enliven your email content:
Get to the Point, Part 1: Subject Lines & Preheaders
Get to the Point, Part 2: Email Body
5 Be’s for Subject Lines that Rock
How to Write the Perfect Preheader
While email might not be as valuable as it was when there were fewer channels to contend with, it’s still well worth your business’s time and attention.
Is your email pulse still slowing? Get in touch and let us help you strategize, design, write and test compelling email campaigns that’ll get your email marketing on the way to happy and healthy.
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