What is Email Marketing?
Email Marketing is defined as sending emails to a database of your prospects or potential customers. It can have the purpose of acquiring new customers, interacting with current ones or building customer loyalty.
Coming... let's make a little bit of history
In 1978 Gary Thuerk, who was Marketing Manager for Digital Equipment Corp, used email as a marketing tool and this generated sales of 13 million dollars and thus started Email Marketing, which is one of the most used channels to this day.
According to Statista, there are currently around 4.147 billion email users in the world, which is almost half of the world's population. Surely your company's niche is within this percentage.
Email Marketing has evolved in appearance, it has adapted to different devices such as smartphones and the emergence of channels such as social networks, but it continues to be a very effective way to have an engaged audience that generates good results, being the direct marketing channel with the highest return on investment.
So, what is the importance of Email Marketing?
Due to its four-decade history, email is no longer as flashy as other more recent channels, but it is still a very effective way to have an engaged audience that generates good results.
Email is incorporated into the life of everyone who uses the internet, and social networks are also a way to spread your message and reach your customers, although it can be seen with more informality and much less commitment than an email. When you open your mailbox, surely, you will see information relevant to your company, financial statements, and receive invoices for some services and digital subscriptions.
Unlike social networks, where content is much more trivial, and can get lost among thousands of daily posts or messages, email is a direct communication channel between the company and the customer.
Then the challenge is to be able to reach the inbox - in the best case the main one -, since emails are reviewed every day in detail. In addition, the users who receive these emails are people who have had a previous point of contact with the products or services offered, so they show a greater interest in the information offered to them.
Therefore, using Email Marketing correctly is a very efficient tool to maintain a relationship with people, whether they are current customers or potential customers. This is an asset that must be nurtured over time and carried out with care, but the results are worth the effort.
Let's develop a little more about its utilities
We have already stated that Email Marketing is a channel that offers added value for any business, since it allows to have a direct and close communication with the user or potential customer.
It can be used to convert the user into a friend and the friend into a customer in order to build loyalty and make the user become a prescriber of the company, its products and/or services. It can also be used to subtly persuade the user to perform an action favorable to the company's interests, such as a purchase or a recommendation.
Always taking into account that marketing is based on obtaining prior consent from the user to establish a relationship with him/her, thus ensuring the company that no one will receive an e-mail that he/she has not requested or shown an interest in receiving and that he/she can dispense with as soon as he/she wishes.
That said, Email Marketing serves to:
- Maintain contact with customers and build relationships.
- Information of interest to the audience.
- Latest publications in the company's blog.
- Generate brand recognition.
- Advertising Campaigns.
- Customer testimonials.
- Database optimization, validation and debugging.
- To send you news and updates.
- New products and/or services.
- Employment opportunities.
- Generate loyalty.
- Raffles or personalized offers.
- Greetings on birthdays and special dates.
- Relationship marketing campaigns.
- Convert leads.
- Collect opinions and feedbacks.
- Audience surveys.
Develop content marketing strategies.
Benefits of Email Marketing
Some of the benefits for companies using email marketing are:
It allows the company to proactively communicate with customers, so that they are reminded of the company's existence on a regular basis. Whether with a welcome email, invitation or birthday greeting.
It is a very economical marketing technique if you compare it with others. The contact list can be 500 or 5000 users and that does not represent a notable increase in the cost of the tool or in time investment.
Segmentation capabilities, virtually everyone uses email today, regardless of their age range or Internet accessibility. In addition, with a good segmentation of your database, you can create emails focused on a specific niche.
Email personalization goes so far that you can add personalized fields that automatically take the user's specific information without the need to compose each email one by one.
Direct communication, email marketing guarantees that the information sent is only received by the person concerned, which makes it very effective for delivering confidential information. Even banks use this method.
It is proven that the return on investment offered by email marketing strategies are superior to most other digital marketing strategies.
Email marketing tools provide us with metrics with which we can analyze each action in order to optimize future actions. They also provide sections for A/B testing.
It is ecological, the use of email saves tons of paper, which contributes to the environment. This tool can be used to send electronic invoices, confirm online purchases, among others.
In this article you can see more benefits and another aspect of the importance of Email Marketing.
Let's make it concrete
Email Marketing services allow us to be one step ahead of our customers, to be proactive, we can establish with them channels dedicated to potential customers and the current market, establishing a direct communication, economic and with a high return on investment, all this with the least ecological impact.
All these email marketing processes can be done in an automated way with the use of a marketing automation platform, which in turn have sections for metrics analytics and testing, contact management and email creation.
These are enough reasons to include this tool in your omnichannel marketing strategy.
An email marketing campaign needs dedication, although it is easily adaptable to your business and needs, you just need to have a little creativity. Remember that an email is in the hand of your potential customer, also the cost of a campaign is low, so it becomes one of the best tools that the company has for direct marketing. Are you up for it?
