10 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Still the Killer App

Of the companies Clutch surveyed, 83% said they were using e-newsletters to make new sales. And more than 70% were using standalone emails and follow-up emails to nurture nibbles of interest from customers. Moreover, email marketing firm Campaign Monitor released a similar study last year and found that businesses can look forward to a $38 return for every dollar they invest in email marketing.

Henry Hyder-Smith, CEO of Adestra (www.adestra.com), an email marketing service provider, confirmed the trend yet again in a study his company conducted with Econsultancy (http://content.adestra.com/hubfs/2016_Reports_and_eGuides/2016-Email-Marketing-Industry-Census.pdf). Those researchers found that 73% of more than 1,100 marketers interviewed said email was their number-one marketing channel in terms of ROI.

The study “points out that companies investing at least a fifth of their marketing budgets on email are eight times more likely to see sales attributable to it in excess of 50%,” Hyder-Smith said.

The reason behind email’s potency? Despite all the buzz over social media, 58% of internet users said the first thing they check on their computerized device each morning is email, according to a study by Exact Target (http://image.exct.net/lib/fe641570776d02757515/m/1/SFF1-TheDigitalMorning.pdf).

“When you have someone’s email, you’re allowed to communicate with them when you want, how you want,” said Derek Halpern, owner of online marketing consultancy Social Triggers (http://socialtriggers.com).

Halpern said he conducted his own informal test recently, pitting email against Twitter. He sent out a post on Twitter with a link he wanted prospective customers to click on. Then he sent out the same post and link via email. The result? Fifty of his Twitter followers clicked on the link, while 1,200 of his email subscribers clicked on the same link.

“Yes, my email list might be twice as large as my social-media following, but it generated about 24 times more clicks,” Halpern said. “That’s the power of email.”

Also helping email’s cause has been all the work IT departments have been doing to block spam from getting to company email boxes. Overall, those safeguards have significantly decreased the amount of spam business users get as compared to just a few years ago. Consequently, email open rates are looking healthy. On average, 17.6% of emails are now being opened by recipients, according to IBM’s 2016 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study (www.silverpop.com/marketing-resources/white-papers/all/2016/email-metrics-benchmark-study-2016).

Of course, getting email marketing right involves more than simply knowing it works. Here are the 10 most popular best practices for email marketing, based on insights from the Econsultancy/Adestra survey:

Engage in Basic Segmentation: Seventy-eight percent of companies said they’re doing basic segmentation with their email marketing. Essentially, that means they’re creating slightly different versions of the same email-marketing message to cater to different segments of a company’s customer base. For example, some customers in the Southeast might get a slightly different message than customers in the Northwest.

Optimize for Mobile: Sixty-four percent of companies said they’re ensuring that their emails are optimized for mobile. In practice, this translates into using single-column email designs that allow for easier resizing; using responsive design that automatically resizes an email based on screen size; and eliminating content in mobile emails that is ordinarily displayed on fullsize computers.

Clean Your List Regularly: Fifty-four percent of companies surveyed said their email marketing success also hinged on ensuring that they cleaned their mailing lists regularly of emails that were bouncing back as no longer valid. They also were quickly removing email addresses from the list when customers requested it.

Encourage Sharing of Your Email on Social Networks: Forty-seven percent of customers surveyed said they got more mileage from their marketing emails after asking their customers to share those emails on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social-media networks.

Use Your Transaction Emails for Marketing: Forty-three percent of companies said they had a standard practice of inserting marketing messages into transaction emails. In practice, that meant they might pitch another product when confirming a purchase by email. Or they might offer a coupon via email when confirming a sign-up for the company’s e-newsletter.

Include Video Content: Forty-two percent of companies said adding video content to their emails was critical to the potency of their marketing messages. Given that online video-sharing service YouTube is the number-two most popular site on the web, the move sounds like a no-brainer.

Do Remarketing: Forty-one percent of companies surveyed said they regularly use emails to remarket to customers. For example, a customer who abandons a shopping cart might be remarketed with another offer for the product. Or a web visitor who failed to confirm a new subscription to the company e-newsletter might be prodded again by email to confirm that sign-up.

Personalize Your Email: Thirty-seven percent of companies surveyed said personalization of emails was also key to their marketing success. The personalization of emails went beyond simply addressing a person by first name. Instead, other personalized data was included in the email, such as the person’s birthday, acknowledgement of previous goods and services purchased by the recipient, and similar qualifiers which send the message that the company truly knew who it was emailing.

Use Emails for Lead Nurturing: Thirty-five percent of companies said they regularly followed up with additional emails to try to close the deal once they received a nibble on an offer by email.

Combine Email With Multichannel Triggers: Thirty-one percent of companies said they followed up by reaching out to the customer via other channels once contact was made by email. The other channels included Facebook, Twitter, telephone and old-fashioned snail mail.