While some people think it’s outdated, the truth is that e-mail marketing is still a vital business tool. It’s a direct marketing form which broadcasts commercial messages to a targeted audience. While generally speaking, every e-mail that you send to a current or potential customer could be seen as a form of marketing, the term is generally related to the e-mails that you send with the purpose of boosting your relationship with your customer base and building customer loyalty and repeat business. It also relates to e-mails that are sent with the purpose of gaining new customers.
You can personalize your e-mails
There is a wide variety of things that you can do with your e-mails in order to make them more enticing and engaging. For example, you can tailor your messages so that they target your customers’ particular interests and implement their name in the subject lines. There is a lot of marketing tools and software that you can find out there to help you make the process of sending personalized emails to your audience simple and streamlined.
E-mail delivers your message
If you have a choice between having someone subscribe to your e-mail list and attracting a new Facebook fan, the truth is that you’ll be better off with focusing on your e-mail campaign. Research has shown that 90% of e-mail gets delivered to your customers’ inboxes, while only 2% of your Facebook fans actually get to see your posts. The reason for this is that Facebook allows your posts to appear for only a limited number of times because they want to push paid advertising options to the forefront.
What this basically means is that if you post a Facebook update to 10,000 followers, only about 200 will actually get to see it. If you send an e-mail to 10,000 subscribers, at least 9,000 of them will find it in their inbox.
Targeting is easy
The fact about e-mail is that it makes it easy for you to separate groups of your potential and current customers, and send them particular marketing messages according to their interests. This segmentation of e-mail lists takes the personalization of e-mails to a whole other level. There is a wide variety of data that you can use for targeting, such as demographic, geographic, and behavioral data. This makes it possible for you to send relevant, valuable, and personalized content to particular customers on your list.
E-mail marketing and SEO
According to experts at GWM, e-mail marketing can also help your SEO efforts. While it won’t directly enable you to rank better in SERPs, it can do a very important thing – encourage engagement. By posting quality content via your platforms, you will establish yourself as an authority in the field. What your e-mail content can do is encourage your audience to go and read your new blog post, and visit your business’ social media pages. The content that they find valuable, they will surely share via their own Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter accounts. Encourage sharing and commenting on your posts. The more shares and interactions you get, the more traffic you are going to drive to your website.
E-mail builds credibility
Business is usually done between people who know, like and trust each other. By sharing valuable and interesting content via your e-mails, you will build credibility with your audience. Your audience will get to read your newsletter and be able to tell whether you are the right company for them before they even call you.
In summation
The truth about e-mail marketing is that it’s still alive and kicking, and it can bring you a variety of benefits. It’s much more probable to deliver your message to your audience, and it is easy for you to target the particular segments of your customer base that you think will be interested in what you have to offer. You will build credibility, and boost your SEO efforts. Finally, you can personalize your e-mails and encourage engagement.