Updated: Jul 5, 2017 @
Email newsletters are a great tool for content marketing.
The goal of content marketing is to become a source of information and guidance for your potential customers so that they come to trust you and rely on your advice.
Eventually, people in the target audience you are writing for are going to have a need for someone who offers your products/services.
In other words, not only you provide great information, but you also remind them about their problems, needs, and desires.
Also, you remind them that you can solve that problem (or need) that they have.
Your company will be the first they think of when they make the decision to buy, because they already trust you, they already may be relying on your information to make business decisions.
Email marketing is important because–like social media–it provides a platform to get your content in front of your target audience.
When people subscribe to your email list, they are signing up to continue to get your content, which helps build your audience.
The biggest return from content marketing won't be the majority of your subscribers, but from the few ones who read all the content, you produce.
Distribution channels (like email newsletters) give you the chance to build this loyal following, rather than just relying on SEO or PPC to drive traffic to your site and get yourself in front of new potential customers.
How Effective is Email Marketing in terms of ROI?
It depends.
Are you sending email to the right audience?
Don’t collect addresses for the sake of having more addresses. Make sure the people on your list want to get your content. Otherwise, they won’t click on your link and will unsubscribe (or report your newsletter as spam).
Are you trying to sell in every email?
Don't try to sell; try to send educational material. People tune out if all they get is sales pitches.
When you send something that can help them solve a big problem or need they have, that’s when you gain their trust.
Your contacts will look forward to getting your newsletter.
I'm constantly amazed at how many new clients the companies I work were getting our newsletter for 1–2 years before they reached out.
Here is the crazy thing:
All of these clients would have been lost had we not stayed in touch with informative content with email marketing.
Newsletters increase customer engagement. Period.
If you do the right strategy, the increase of income from your email marketing campaign will be higher than the cost of the software + the content creating + Cost of getting traffic for subscribers.
How do you measure your email marketing effectiveness?
Email marketing is also one of the most measurable options out there, giving you all the tools you need to continually improve your communication strategy.
With each communication campaign you can keep track of the following:
- Total Emails Sent: How many subscribers did contact?
- Total Emails not-delivered (or Bounce rate): Of those sent, how many successfully landed in an inbox?
- Opened Rate: How many were opened?
- Total Clicks: How many subscribers clicked a link in your email?
- Deliverability Rate: Automatically calculates Total Emails Delivered / Total Emails Sent. A score above 95% is ideal, but hard to achieve if you purchased a list instead of building it yourself. Open Rate: Measures the percentage of emails opened out of the total delivered. 30-40% open rate is considered a success.
- Click-Through Rate: Measures the percentage of how many people clicked on a link in your email out of total emails that were opened. Results vary but again, 20-30% is a good one.
- Email Visits: Measures how many people visited your site because of an email. This is important if your goal is to drive visits rather than sales.
- Email Conversion: Measures how many people responded to your CTA and completed the desired action such as a purchase or reservation.
- Unsubscribe rate: Measures how many people opt out from your subscriber list because of a particular campaign.
How do you compare email marketing vs other marketing strategies?
Do a random test by following two types of potential customers that you got their email, you could do a sample of 100 potential customers (or more).
1) 50 of them don't subscribe them to any newsletter
2) 50 subscribed to a newsletter at least 1 newsletter.
Track both: subscribed and non-subscribed engagement over time. This is easy to do with the right CRM, so once they buy something you can know right away how many emails they received if any.
You might find that newsletter subscribers have a slight (but significant) increase in engagement.
It keeps your company name in their mind and also helps associate the brand with the topics of the newsletter.
Imagine two identical companies, one with a regular newsletter and one without. Which company will be in a better position to establish direct communication with customers?
One way of thinking about it is that acquisition typically costs five times more than retention, so any money spent on retention has a huge advantage when it comes to effectiveness.
Newsletters are expensive: Software, Databases, Copywriting, List Analytics, and cleaning.
Do you know what's more expensive than having to maintain a newsletter?
Not having customers and going out of business.
Post Summary:
- Email Marketing is still relevant in 2017 and will still be relevant in the next 5 years.
- One important trick to increase customer engagement is not trying to sell in every email.
- To make email marketing effective there are key metrics that you should follow and optimize: Emails Sent, Open Rate, Bounce Rate, CTR, Conversions, Unsubscribe Rate and others.
- Do measure the relative effectiveness of email marketing compared to other marketing tools you could follow a sample potential customers that aren't in any lists and compared them to a sample of potential customers the ones that are.
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