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5 good reasons why you should fall back in love with Email Marketing
Jul 24, 2010 |
By Andrew Lloyd Gordon
Social Media this. Social Media that. Twitter here, there and everywhere. Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn.
Social Media and Social Networking is all the rage. Whilst some still think it’s a bit of a fad (it isn’t) there’s no doubt how powerful Social Media already is and how powerful it’s going to become. However, if you’ve been putting effort into social media and have yet to seen the returns, then you may need to dig around for other online marketing techniques to try. Often, lurking quietly at the bottom of your Direct Marketing bag-of-tricks, is that old stalwart of digital, Email Marketing.
Whilst not as ‘sexy’ as Social Media, Email Marketing can often be far more powerful and cost effective than anything you can do on Facebook. With the current buzz about social media, it may be time to blow some dust off your Email Marketing and fall in love with it all over again. Here’s just 5 simple reasons why…
1. It’s highly cost effective
In these tough economic times, there’s no other form of marketing that gives you more bang for your buck. Especially when you compare the costs of email to a direct mail campaign, email is incredibly cost effective.
If you properly integrate your email marketing with the rest of your marketing then you’ll see an uplift in response rates from across your media spend. Not only will you be saving money with email you’ll be making extra revenue from your newly integrated campaigns.
2. It provides lots of customer feedback
Social Media gurus will tell you that modern marketing is all about communication and dialogue. Send out emails that are interesting and engaging and there’s no better way to generate a response from your stakeholders.
This response can come not only in the form of replies but as immediate, obvious and trackable clickthroughs to your website.
3. You can make it highly engaging
There are lots of ways in which you can use Email Marketing to engage with your target groups.
You can ensure that the imagery is modern, bold and attractive. You can write body copy that reflects a lively, interesting and less ‘corporate persona’. You can use email to educate, inform and entertain your subscribers so that they become loyal customers and raving fans.
You can do all this as long as you’re committed to learning what does and does not work and having a genuine dialogue with your subscriber base.
4. It can (and should) be highly targeted
Learn how to combine other customer information with your Email Marketing and you can have no better form of highly targeted messaging. And emails that are better targeted are more likely to be opened, read and responded to.
For example, if you’re able to combine the Clickstream data from your website and eCRM systems, you can then send people emails when they abandon their shopping carts. Or you can ask them to rate and review your products and services in social media. Which they will do for you because you also use your customer information to send out emails that are targeted, engaging and useful.
5. It’s quick to turn around
Everyone agrees that the pace of business is speeding up. Organisations of all sizes need to be ever more flexible and responsive. The luxury of having weeks and months to produce creative campaigns and promotions has gone.
Email Marketing provides an incredibly adaptable platform to launch marketing campaigns. From when the decision to launch an email campaign is made to the time someone presses ‘Send’ can be very short. Especially if successful email templates and proven Subject Lines, offers and Calls to Action are re-used.
Email Marketing is so efficient that smart marketing teams can use it to refer to news items from earlier that same day or even unexpected weather conditions and events.
Are you in love yet?
I hope I’ve convinced you how powerful Email Marketing can be and how you should love it so 
In fact, I suspect that you probably don’t need any more convincing. But if you’ve been spending lots of time, money and effort in Social Media for little return, then maybe all you needed when it comes to Email Marketing, is a little reminding?
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Thanks for the great article. Working in the field makes it so easy to lose sight of the fundamentals of why this is such an effective channel.
If I can add a few more reasons, capturing emails from your website can be another way to keeping the dialogue open with your web site visitors if they aren’t ready to buy yet. Just paste in a sign up form.
Use email to repurpose the content you have on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It’s an amazing way to aggregate the content you already have. Also, by including links to your social media sites, then you have a greater ability to make your integrated marketing efforts even more effective with that all important trust building.
Great article. Judging by the number of pro email articles and stats lately it seems like the industry is realising that social media is just another channel.
Everyone thought DM was dead when email came along but it appeared people were making the same assumptions about email as soon as social media hit the web. Marketers need to realise the importance of integrating all channels in order to achieve optimum performance.
Interesting article. covering some great b2b data points.
Good article and refreshing to hear email marketing trumpeted in the social media era. One thing add – completely trackable and dynamic HTML’s add a whole new ingredient to the mix. Let the email be populated with different material for different target markets. One shoe does not fit all of course.
Thank you everyone who has made a comment. Some great and useful input.
I totally agree with Hannah about integrating email into everything else. It’s just one of the things email does well.
And thanks too for the suggestions and comments from Melanie and John on how to re-purpose content and the use of trackable and dynamic HTML emails.
Maybe, after all, it’s not just me who is still in love with Email Marketing?!
….and…all the analysis we have done for clients shows almost an indentical colleration between sales and email volume. Send an email and sales go up. Sales which sometimes don’t always get attributed to ‘email’ as customers often ’search’ or go direct to the retailer bypassing the link on the email. The so called nudge effect where the mere presence of your brand in the customers inbox can nudge the customer to your site and a purchase
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I totally agree with your conclusion and would add that for some companies growing their customer base can actually be disastrous
Got to agree that email marketing is imperative to successful business especially in the advent of Globalisation. However we mustn’t forget the impact that other marketing strategies have, and thus must be designed so all aspects are handled appropriately.
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