Across the globe inboxes are flooded with emails carrying the latest promotions, upcoming events, must-have purchases, and “once-in-a-lifetime” deals. It is estimated that 88.2 billion consumer emails will be received in 2016. While total received emails are expected to rise at an impressive 7% to last year, consumer emails are projected to stall at a mere .3% growth.
Are these statistics validating the impression that email marketing is going out of style? Or are there tricks to the trade that simply need to be mastered?
Proof points to the latter.
Email marketing is still a necessity to any campaign. While there may be newer forms of communication, like social media and SMS messaging, email rounds out programs creating a cohesive approach in all channels.
Email’s personalization capabilities are what set it a part and keep it relevant. The most reliable and important tool to have is a robust content management system (CMS). We’ll save the intricacies of CMSs for another time, but essentially, it will collaborate every piece of information you can attain about each customer and funnel the collective information into a workflow that determines effective solutions, to in this case, drive the brand-to-consumer conversation. These new tools allow marketers to create contextual messages that are specific to an individual customer’s location, device, purchase-history, and real-time status. It’s all about delivering the right message to the right customer at the right time.
Email isn’t irrelevant, it has become extension of your campaign that can pick up where social media, traditional media, and in-store experience may have left off.
The qualities you know about the individuals on your list will have the greatest impact on your ROI. Let’s also keep in mind, email marketing still has the highest ROI; $39 for $1 spent.
Beyond personalization, what other tactics are making email cool again?
Mobile marketing—Making sure that your campaign is mobile friendly and responsive is pertinent. Email follows customers everywhere on their mobile device. You want to make sure the content is accessible.
Images and interactivity—Keep an eye out for brands who will start allowing customers to shop WITHIN an email, without ever having to go to a landing page or leave their inbox. Yes, this is on the horizon so get ready to join the fun!
Linking channels—Include linkage of your campaign on social media sites, YouTube, whatever it may be to keep your story and messaging aligned at all customer touch point.
Testing—Don’t stick to one strategy; test, evaluate, retest. Learn what actions to various metric points yield. A/B testing is your friend. Learn from mistakes until you find what works best for your brand.
Need help revamping your email strategy? Ready to create cohesive multi-channel campaign? Give us a shout!
