Email marketing. Some may consider this to be old-school already. But we’re here to tell you, it’s alive and well and you should be doing it too.
While it may not be the shiny new toy on the shelf, email marketing has a proven track record of consistently working. It is an affordable tool that more times than not provides a better ROI than Google AdWords and Facebook ads. For small businesses and start-ups in particular, it’s become a lifeline to growing their business. According to Forrester data, small businesses allocate about 10 percent of their marketing budgets on email marketing, which totaled approximately $2.8 billion in 2017. That’s a good thing because Forrester also reports that consumer email attitudes over the past four years have become increasingly positive. Consumers firmly acknowledge being satisfied with email experiences from all types of businesses.
So even though there is all this other communication media today, like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, email marketing is still a major player.
And there is a new train of thought about email marketing that is helping it sustain its place in this new digital age. Dela Quist, CEO of Alchemy Worx, suggests that email stop being looked at as mail, and more as television. His point is that email is less like mail in terms of expensiveness to send and mailbox clogging to receive. Emails are actually very economical to send and painless for most people to ignore. Suddenly, this frees you up to think about email marketing in terms of broadcasting – as in how many customers and potential customers your message can reach and how often.
More Emails = More Revenue
He doesn’t suggest you just take his word for it. He has dug into the data and it continually provides evidence that the more emails you send the more revenue you will generate. Initial testing has shown that customers who got, but didn’t open an email were revenue generators the day after a campaign was sent. Additionally, companies that looked at their email marketing over a longer span and not just by campaign, found that they ultimately reached more potential customers and gave current customers more chances to do business with them, which increased their bottom line.
Further making the case for email marketing is a 2013 study that appeared in the Journal of Digital & Social Media Marketing that found after reviewing a year’s worth of data from a major U.S. retailer on days when an email blast was sent, revenue increased from non-email sources by 10 percent to 40 percent. This highlights that companies may not even be aware or attribute how much of their revenue is traceable to their email efforts.
Remain Focused on the Big Picture
But what’s the downside to this “more is better” approach? It’s important to acknowledge that sending more emails will impact open and click through rates. Increasing frequency will most likely cause click and open rates to go down, and your unsubscriber rate to go up. However, keeping an eye on the bigger picture requires recognizing the value of subscribers even those that don’t open an email and their positive impact on a business’ overall revenue stream.
Segmentation also requires a little rethinking today as well. The recommendation for segmentation is to try tailoring the right message to the right type of customer, but don’t segment your list to cut down on the number of people getting an email. Spending time to create a couple meaningful messages may be better than trying to come up with 10 different messages to target super specific audiences. That doesn’t mean to not A/B test. By all means test, gather and interpret data, and create more attention-getting emails.
What do you need to get onboard? Accept that we are attached to technology every day for much of the day – so while it may seem like you’re over-communicating, it doesn’t mean you’re bothering anyone. So go ahead — press the send button now.
