Email marketing remains one of the few media where you can engage with customers who signed up to communicate with you and are truly interested in your company. Reaching an audience who has agreed to receive your messages is becoming more and more rare these days. While social media is a necessary marketing channel, you’re not necessarily reaching people who are always interested in you.
This makes email marketing an important tool. A recent State of Email Marketing in 2018 survey report by Clutch looks at how and why companies utilize email communication. Taking a look at the results might help other companies consider objectives that fit their organization as well. Almost three-quarters of businesses across most industries utilize email marketing. This statistic makes sense when you consider that 90% of emails reach the correct consumer’s inbox, but only 2% of Facebook followers see a business’s posts in their News Feeds, you really start to appreciate a good email list.
That’s what the report found – that businesses recognize the value in having an exclusive list of people who are paying attention to what they have to say. Therefore, companies are sending a variety of emails at various frequencies to help in their efforts to retain customers and increase engagement.
Companies reported their top four email uses include: product/company updates (69%), promotional emails (69%), newsletters, (68%), and event invitations (65%). Companies are working hard to keep customers intrigued, and often send non-predictable emails too, such as a new promotion highlight to ignite interest and generate potential sales. To further increase customer engagement, recent trends have shown the move toward highly targeted campaigns that segment email lists into groups based on specific data/demographics to speak directly to certain customers’ needs.
Along this line, the survey report discusses the importance of informing customers about the types of emails a business plans on sending them. Transparency should be a central part of an email marketing strategy, especially for those businesses that have subscribers outside of the U.S. due to the new European Union GDPR rules that regulate how companies use consumer data.
In addition to transparency, companies can refrain from inundating customers with messages that might cause them to unsubscribe. Frequency of emails was also addressed by businesses and really varied based on industry and company size. In general, of the companies that conduct email marketing the majority sends emails weekly (41%) or daily at (32%). For example, an auto repair company doesn’t have customers needing their services everyday so emails don’t need to be sent super frequently, whereas a healthcare services company has wellness and lifestyle information to disseminate on a regular basis.
Company size also plays a role in why businesses use this marketing tool with customers. Larger companies with more than 500 employees use email to retain their customer base (27%) and keep engagement levels high (25%). Smaller companies also use emails to grow and retain customers (34%), but also to build brand awareness (17%). For smaller companies the need to establish their presence necessitates a stronger focus on building their brand in the marketplace. For larger organizations with an established brand their needs center on keeping customers interested in their offerings.
Email marketing is a strong digital marketing strategy that many companies find successful in helping them achieve their marketing and sales goals. Businesses need to carefully consider their audience and brand positioning to determine the type and frequency of emails to send because it needs to be a part of their marketing mix as email marketing is alive and kicking. Ready to see how a well-designed email campaign can drive responses for your business, let MMP help.
