Does email marketing still make sense?
What is Email Marketing?
EDM marketing (Electronic Direct Mail) is also called: Email marketing, e-mail marketing. It is a marketing tool used to promote sales by sending EDM emails to target customers, establishing communication channels with them, and conveying relevant information directly to them.
Edit this Email marketing illustration
Email marketing has three basic elements:
- user permission,
- email message, and
- the value of the message to the user.
If one of these three elements is missing, it cannot be called effective email marketing. Email marketing is a direct sales method that uses email to communicate with customers. It is also widely used in the field of online marketing. Email marketing is one of the oldest methods of online marketing. It can be said that email marketing is older than most website promotion and online marketing methods.
Application scenarios of EDM
- Industry: finance, education, e-commerce, foreign trade, travel, B2B, etc.
- Cycle time: customer acquisition, activation, retention
- Form: product information, sales information, market research, etc.
- Role: Develop new customers, maintain/recall old customers, brand marketing
Edit this Email marketing illustration template
The value of EDM
Email does not feel new and exciting amidst the constant influx of new technologies, and marketers can easily forget about it. Other online marketing models, such as online advertising, search engine bidding rankings, search engine optimization, and video advertising may be more common and popular compared to social media marketing, but in contrast to these passive, indirect marketing methods that make it difficult to retain user behavior data, Email marketing carries distinct data characteristics, where user behavior can be tracked, user data can be mined, and the emphasis is on active, interactive experiences and calculable conversion rates (ROI).
There is also a clear trend that the number of people using ad blockers will continue to increase, which means that advertising in websites will become less effective. As trust in social media companies declines, consumers are spending less time browsing social media.
While social media is unlikely to disappear, marketers are aware that over-reliance on social media is risky. 2017 to 2018 saw a 91% year-over-year increase in Facebook’s CPM (cost per thousand ad displays), which is an inflationary rate for marketing budgets that should never be ignored.
As you can see, EDM remains one of the most cost effective ways to advertise in an increasingly diverse format. Since EDM has so many advantages, how do we implement email marketing?
Plan it in Four steps.
- Clarify the purpose of implementing EDM marketing – We first need to clarify what is the purpose of carrying out EDM marketing, the purpose should be consistent with the company’s marketing strategy? Is it to promote the brand image? Or specific products and services? Or to maintain customer relationships? Or to expand new customers? A clear and unambiguous purpose will provide a strong guarantee for the later planning.
- Build enterprise mailing list database – There are three main ways to establish enterprise mailing list database,
- The first one: the customer information accumulated by the company, including registration through the company website, mailing list subscription, offline business transactions, etc.
- The second kind: database leasing, currently there are many data leasing companies in the market to carry out this business, you can also cooperate with relevant websites, choose several information websites with high overlap with target customers and have certain popularity in the industry, they often have a large amount of user data resources.
- The third one: using specific programs to capture email addresses on the network, this method has almost no cost investment, but the effect is also the worst, because it is impossible to define the validity and authenticity of the captured data.
- Email marketing creative design – This includes the design of the email page, the planning and design of the landing page of the email link website. The web code of the email page should follow certain design standards, the conception and planning of the email body and title, a good title helps to arouse the recipient’s interest and click to open your email, an inappropriate title may cause the recipient to delete the email directly, when the email reaches the user’s mailbox, the title directly determines the open rate of the email. In the arrangement of content, consider the customer’s experience. Leave out the unsubscribe function, not necessarily many people will actually unsubscribe, but in line with the rules of permission-based email marketing. In addition, marketing emails should be interactive, and whether they integrate social media platforms so that customers can not only read the emails, but also dive into the application, use the social networking buttons to recommend it to friends, and complete the purchase in the email. These personalized, triggered, interactive marketing emails can produce amazing results in increasing retention and sales.
- Sending and post data analysis – After sending emails using EDM platform, it is important to track the response of customers and check the EDM marketing effect. By analyzing the tracking results, monitoring the registration conversion rate, unsubscribe rate, email arrival rate, open rate, reading rate and link click rate of the mailing list, through these monitoring means, you can improve the techniques of selecting audience and sending emails.
Finally, mature EDM marketing should be to determine the frequency of sending emails and establish the psychological expectation of receiving emails within a fixed period of time, which is very important for retaining users and building trust.
Evaluating Email Marketing Effectiveness Indicators
Regarding the analysis of the effectiveness of marketing emails, we can start from the analysis of four basic indicators, which are reach rate, open rate, click rate and conversion rate.
- Reach rate: The proportion of emails that have reached users’ mailboxes, which is the first step to successfully complete the final conversion and is a fundamental indicator. The formula of arrival rate is: actual arrival in users’ inboxes/sent quantity × 100%. There are two reasons for the effective arrival that cannot be reached: – the user mailbox is full and the acceptance of emails is restricted, and the second user email is invalid.
- Open rate: The key to conversion. Recipients will judge whether to open an email immediately, open it later, not open it or delete it within 5 seconds or even less after seeing it. The sender’s name, the sender’s email address, the title, and the last time the sender’s email was received are the main influencing factors. The subtlety of this happens when brand value and awareness play a decisive role, and a highly recognized brand will help advertisers increase open rates. Likewise, clear, provocative, reliable, and evocative headlines help drive users to open emails. According to research in the US, 70% of users who place an order make an immediate purchase within 3 hours of opening the email.
- Click-through rate: This can be achieved by tracking user click-through behavior. The click-through rate depends on the overall design style, user needs, and of course whether the promotional or keynote content, call-to-action elements are working. Email click-through rate is a more accurate measure of the effectiveness of EDM marketing.
- Conversion rate: The final goal of email delivery. The conversion goal for an online retail site is an order, for a company selling software the conversion goal is a download, for a training institute the conversion goal is a form submission. Of course, other specific goals can be customized, such as viewing a specific page – an announcement of a holiday event or a specific action such as uploading a photo, voting, leaving a comment, etc.
Infographic for Email Marketing
Your emails are designed to get important information about your message, brand, service or product to your audience. They’re also about getting more interactions, more conversions, and even more sales for your business. But instead of sending long-form emails (which studies have shown don’t get read), why not insert some of that information into an infographic?
Infographics deliver information faster and more effectively!
The Importance of Effective Email Writing
While we’re all writing a lot of emails, you might be shocked to find that a lot of people don’t know how to compose a clean and tidy message that gets people’s attention. Perhaps, many of us haven’t learned to write email in school, but learning how to write email in the workplace is an indispensable skill.
A concise email allows the recipient to clearly understand your message, which contributes to effective business communication. A poorly written email is hard for the recipient to understand, and it can hinder the development of a business relationship.
How to Write an Effective Email
- When you write an email, don’t write anything vague on the subject. Messages with vague titles are likely to be thrown into the recipient’s spam box or ignored. For examples: 1) If you want to apply for a job, write the title of the position in the title bar. 2) If your email is to a colleague, write a summary of the purpose of your email in one sentence in the subject column
- When write the email content ask yourself: 1) what message you want to convey to the recipient? 2) What action or response do you expect the recipient to take?
- If you know the recipient’s name but don’t know them yourself, greet them with the correct title / gender, first, an last name, etc.
- Using proper grammar in emails is very important. Senders are punished for grammatical mistakes by readers, intentionally or unconsciously by using spelling checker or grammar checker tools.
- Using proper grammar in emails is very important. Senders might be punished for grammatical mistakes by the recipient, intentionally or unconsciously.
- Read it again, proofread it and polish it if necessary
