What is email marketing?

The tools available to marketing professionals have increased in the last twenty years. The advent of digital marketing was a real revolution in the way companies relate to their customers. However, few techniques have maintained their effectiveness for as long as email marketing. In its broadest sense, email marketing consists of sending promotional material by email to potential or current customers. According to some experts, any email sent by the company should be considered as part of the company’s digital marketing strategy. The content of emails may vary, among the most common are: advertising, promotions, calls to action, contests, sales or donations. Email marketing goals also vary: gain new customers, build and improve relationships with regulars, and build greater business trust. For the email marketing strategy to be effective, it is necessary to create quality content that connects with the customer. It’s also important to find the middle ground between sending too many emails that overwhelm you or too few and forget about the brand. Strategy emails should be valuable, relevant, expected, and integrated. Next, we’ll explain each of these features and how they can help improve each customer’s brand experience.

Advantages of email marketing

After SEO (search engine optimization), email marketing is the most effective technique in the digital marketing mix. This is partly due to the ease it provides when monitoring a campaign. Results are measurable in relation to objectives and user behavior can be tracked. However, this is just one of the advantages that email marketing offers you. The reality is that this technique offers you a range of possibilities to position your company in the market and provide the kind of personalized attention that modern customers are looking for.

Cost reduction and return on investment

Email marketing doesn’t need large investments of money. In fact, it is one of the most economical techniques used in digital marketing. Added to this, it offers a high ROI (return on investment). It is estimated that, for every dollar invested in this tool, 38 return. Even by hiring an agency to run campaigns and do all the work, the cost is much lower than other strategies, especially those associated with traditional marketing such as printing brochures or press advertisements. The explanation of why email marketing is so effective is simple: it allows you to send personalized messages to the maximum and relevant to the customer. That’s why the more data we have from the user, the better your campaigns will be. Other important savings have to do with customer engagement for your database. In theory, only those customers who have accepted to receive emails will receive your communications. This saves you from having to run targeted ads on search engines or social networks.

The scope of email is greater than other media

Virtually all Internet users have one or more email addresses. While social media is closed and private platforms, email continues to be decentralized and free. This way you avoid problems with the constant changes in social media policies that increasingly point to the need to pay for ads in order to reach your audience. In addition, most users prefer communication via email as a more personal means. While a sales campaign can be invasive on social media, in email marketing the customer may be more open to information.

Conversion and metrics

Conversions are the holy grail of every digital marketing professional. Depending on the strategy and the objectives set, a conversion can represent a sale, an enrollment on a website, take advantage of a promotion or get leads. At the same time, digital and specific email marketing stands out because it is entirely measurable. In each campaign, you will know who opened the email, if they clicked on one of the links and what their behavior was in each next step. This allows you to monitor what works and what doesn’t work in real-time. It also allows you to accurately calculate the ROI of the campaign.

Tips for a successful email marketing campaign

The success of any email marketing strategy will depend on the four variables that we mentioned at the beginning, that is, that it is valuable, relevant, expected and integrated. This will help you have a higher conversion rate and create lasting value relationships with your company’s customers.

• Value: The content of your emails should be valuable and interesting to the customer. A practical exercise is to think about the type of email you like to receive and try to move it to your campaigns. Also, what you send should have some use for them and avoid focusing too much on the sale.
• Relevance: Meeting your audience is key to any digital marketing campaign. By targeting your target audience, you make sure the email reaches whoever needs to reach. If your campaign isn’t well-targeted, you run the risk of having your email marked as spam just because it’s irrelevant.
• Expected: The cadence of the emails must be constant without overwhelming the client. It is also necessary (and mandatory depending on the country) that customers are the ones who register in the database and can withdraw easily. In this way, the emails will be better received by the client.
• Integration: To ensure better results it is necessary that the email marketing campaign is integrated with the rest of the channels. For example, that content looks good on cell phones or that the pages the email points to are easy to use. Remember that it’s all part of the company’s digital marketing strategy.

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