5 Benefits of Email Marketing
Email Marketing is a way to reach customers and prospects through direct electronic mail. Unlike spam, it allows you to contact only people interested in your product or service. The information is sent out to a selective list of contacts, called a database. Often, this is a list of people who have subscribed to your newsletter or company updates, or it could also be a list of people who may have never heard of your business or considered your products, but who are interested in your business’ area of expertise. Read on to discover why this advertising method is so popular and used by so many companies.
1. Time saving
Email Marketing has the huge benefit of offering the possibility to use templates in order to save precious time. Basically, this means that a single employee could produce a communication piece in less than a day when postal mailing (snail mail) or telesales campaigns can take days or even weeks. When sending out a new email blast from a template, all you’ll need to do before sending the campaign is update the content, update the links and swap the graphics. Obviously, your database must be complete and functional to simplify the process, otherwise constantly editing data can significantly slow the process.
2. Cost reduction
The good news is that email marketing is not only time saving but also cost saving. You don’t need to pay for printing, postage costs, phone lines or advertising rates. Besides, as mentioned before, a single employee can be in charge of the campaign, so the rest of your team is free to spend time on other projects. If your database is accurate, then there is no marketing channel in which you'll spend less to get greater returns on your investment than email marketing. If you don’t have a database, get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to offer you our services.
3. Real time messages
As you certainly know, communication campaigns such as print ads or postal mail are time consuming and consequently, there’s a delay between the moment you launch the campaign creation process and the moment it goes viral. The great advantage of email marketing is its swiftness: as a campaign can be created in a few hours, you could literally send “day-of” messages and real-time messages to customers to promote a limited-time offer, or even wish someone a happy birthday. With email marketing, delays are not a problem anymore as everything can be instant.
4. Personalised messages
Nowadays, mass communication is the main strategy of companies who prefer to reach as many people as possible, but the problem is that the message has to be a “one-size-fits-all” format. In this case, the customer may not engage as much with the content of the advertisement as it’s not personalised. The ideal solution is to involve the prospect in email marketing as the content of the email can easily be adapted to suit each customer’s needs and wants. With email marketing, you have the possibility to insert the customer’s name into the email, or to take their purchase history into account and segment your customer list to send very personalised messages. As you can imagine, this would be impossible to achieve for the same budget and in the same timeframe if you were using postal mailing or advertising campaigns!
5. Track user engagement
Thanks to email marketing platforms, it is now possible to track information that helps you figure out what part of your strategy is effective and what isn’t. Indeed, you can know how many people opened the email, how many people clicked on a link in the email, how many people complained that the email was a spam, and how many unsubscribed. It’s even possible to track your business’s sales back to your website and determine if the email sent had an influence on the sales. Thanks to this analysis, you have the chance to improve your strategy and test your marketing messages. With email marketing, it is also possible to conduct an A/B test to determine which of your messages is more successful with your audience.
I hope you’re now convinced that adding email marketing to your marketing mix could only be beneficial for your business. This form of marketing drives an excellent return on investment and customer engagement. However, the effectiveness of email marketing depends on the quality of the content, the design and the database; elements that have to be mastered by qualified professionals. Get in touch with us and we’ll be more than happy to help with your email marketing strategy!
Clémence Barthélemy
Clémence is a Junior Marketing Assistant at Sierra Marketing. Joining the Sierra team, Clémence got to experience the various facets of marketing. Her work at Sierra Marketing mostly focuses on online marketing, social media and community management. Through Clémence’s work for different clients, she found a passion for digital marketing.
