Email Marketing
It’s something that we do every day, but some brands aren’t doing as well as they could. That’s right, we’re talking about email. Study after study finds that email is still one of the most common things people do online and it remains a popular marketing tool with an excellent return on investment (ROI).
Over the last few years, there’s been an increase in the amount of automation in online marketing. Email and automated marketing campaigns go together like peanut butter and jelly. A recent study conducted by the email marketing firm SharpSpring estimates 85 percent of the world’s leading marketing agencies are seeing a dramatic improvement in how email marketing campaigns are performing, and half the firms surveyed stated they are seeing significant improvements.
Email is one of the oldest online tools out there, so why is there such a spike in performance? Businesses are now able to add a newfound level of personalization to their email marketing campaigns that didn’t exist a few years ago without an expensive development team. With only a couple of clicks, tools such as Mailchimp can add personal elements to your customer’s email. It goes a lot further than just adding their name, if it’s in your database, it can be added to an email.
There’s been a lot of innovation in the email marketing space over the last few years and marketers can now see how well their email marketing campaigns are working in real time, allowing them to make adjustments on the fly. Having the ability to segment customers, mobile-friendly designs, and strong call to actions (CTAs) are making email marketing an important element in campaigns both big and small.
We know that people are spending an increasingly large amount of time online and email remains a common way of communication, especially when people are at work. Smartphones make it easy to multitask and people are checking their email while they are shopping, working out, falling asleep and various other moments throughout the day.
Adding a more personalized touch to email allows your customers to ability to better connect with your brand and your message. People get annoyed when they receive an email without any type of personalization, it’s important to understand your audience and give them information that’s relevant to them.
You can now test your email campaigns to find out what works and what doesn’t. Brands can run A/B tests to see what subject lines, content, colours, images, and CTAs people best engage with. Email platforms will even use your data to tell you the best time of day to send email blasts. We have clients that have been shocked how changing the colour of a CTA button can lead to more leads. Every audience is unique, with their own set of preferences – having the ability to test your emails is the best way to understand your customers and keep them engaged.
The ability to segment your customer email lists is another exciting development for email marketing. You can now segment your email lists based on a wide range of criteria and give these people information that’s relevant to them. Maybe you want to send a custom email for return customers, or for customers who live in another city, this and much more can be done easily with email list segmentation. Email can now be linked to your AdWords and Facebook advertising campaigns, allowing you the abilty to present custom advertising to people on your email lists.
It’s amazing how many companies don’t make their emails mobile friendly. Most people check their email on their mobile device. If your email looks bad on a smartphone, tablet, or even a smartwatch you’re probably missing out on an excellent opportunity. Most of the popular email marketing platform makes mobile design easy, with pre-designed templates suited to mobile devices.
This is an exciting time for email marketing and for your company to utilize this technology for your brand. Don’t end up in your customer’s trash folder, ensure you email your customers with relevant information that’s customized to them. The best emails serve as a conversation between an individual customer and a brand.
At Insiteful Solutions, we’ve been helping a wide range of Toronto companies find email success with our team of experienced writers, designers and developers. Have a question about how your brand can stick out in inboxes? Contact us and we’ll help take your email marketing to the next!