How on earth can the outdated form of communication – email – improve your business’s digital marketing strategy in any way?
We’ve correlated 5 reasons to why you should be focuses on implementing email marketing as part of your digital marketing strategy:
Email Marketing vs Social Media:
One way we like to show how valuable email marketing can be is through comparing it to its much younger, and more flexible relative, social media.
On paper, the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter should be a far better form of promoting your business, shouldn’t it?
Social media is dominated by massive companies spending huge amounts of money to guarantee that their brand appears on your feed. If you’re a small company with little-to-no marketing budget, how well can you really do? On top of this, the word ‘algorithms’ has been made infamous for how damaging it can be for the average small business owner. Due to these algorithms, your social media post, on average, is only going to be seen by a tiny level of your audience; estimated to be a small as 10%.
So, how does Email Marketing compare?
- One main benefit to Email Marketing is the lack of restrictive algorithms. The only barrier to reaching your audience is the prospective recipient manually signing-up to your email list.
- Only 20% of Social Media users want to receive promotional material from brands, compared to 60% of consumer’s preferred method of communication being via email.
- The average Engagement Rates (ER) of social media posts are 0.58%, while Email Marketing holds an average Open Rate (OR) of 21.33% and a Click-Through Rate (CTR) of 3.71%.
As you can see from the above, Email Marketing shouldn’t be thrown away for Social Media. There are obvious benefits to Social Media – brand building, instant connection, response communication – however, Email Marketing still has a placed in your 2021 Digital Strategy.
Email is Great for Conversions & Offers a High ROI
If your business is centred around sales, Conversion Rates is an important metric to focus on. Luckily, Email Marketing holds one of the highest conversion rates of the Digital Marketing world.
On average, the conversion rates across all industries of Email Marketing were 7.13 % in 2020 (Mialki, 2020). When comparing this figure to other promotional channels, it clear that Email Marketing’s conversion potential is great:
Google Ads: 3.75%
Social Media Paid: 2.5%
Social Media Organic: 0.71% (Berry, 2020)
As the above shows, Email Marketing’s conversion rates can be great. However, how is the ROI of emails? If you’re unsure what ROI is, it stands for ‘Return on Investment’ and is simply how much money was made from an investment into marketing via emails.
In terms of ROI, Email Marketing reigns supreme with the highest ROI than any other marketing channel. According to eMarketer, the median ROI for Email Marketing is 122%, which is around 4x higher than all the other channels (Sean, 2019). That means from every £1 you spend; you can expect to earn back £2.22.
An Effective Way to Collect Customer Feedback
We all know how important understanding your customer is in today’s business sphere. When there is a large amount of competition, having more of an understanding of the thoughts, preferences and behaviour of your consumer base is vital to gaining an edge over the competition.
Email Marketing can gift you the opportunity to share your survey with an audience who’s more willing to spend time offering their feedback. Additionally, Email Marketing tools such as Mailchimp have survey creation abilities that allow you to create surveys where your email contacts list is found. Furthermore, with Mailchimp for example, you are able to segment portions of your audience to contacts who regularly complete surveys. By doing this, you can expect high returns on your survey responses, and therefore more valuable consumer data.
