Is Email Marketing Effective?
In today’s digital landscape, where social media and messaging apps dominate communication, email remains a powerhouse marketing channel. Despite recurring claims about “email being dead,” it continues to evolve and deliver exceptional results for businesses of all sizes.
Whether you’re using email marketing to reach your tailored target audience or to find potential new customers, there are effective techniques that are ideal for increasing higher open rates and engagement for any campaign. Creating the perfect email newsletter can take time and planning, especially when you want to maximise your open rates as much as possible. Here’s our advice on how to use email to enhance your digital marketing strategy.
Is email marketing still relevant?
Email marketing is still one of the leading channels for digital marketing, because it offers the perfect balance of stability, control and cost-effectiveness. Trends like influencer marketing and gamification may be popular ways to engage your customers today, but there’s still immense value in email because it offers you a powerful way of boosting brand awareness and promoting your products and services to the right people.
There are currently an estimated 4 billion daily email users, which means that businesses have a wealth of opportunities to connect with their customers. It offers one of the highest ROIs of any marketing channel and is endlessly customisable without extensive budget requirements.
How to benefit from email marketing
Create engaging content
There’s no avoiding the fact that internet users today are flooded with content. This can make it harder for businesses to stand out, and it can be challenging to keep up the pace when it comes to creating content too.
Start with your subject line, as this can have a huge impact on open rates, especially if the content inside is focused on promotions, sales or new products. With this in mind, it’s best to include something to inspire the subscriber to open the email in the first place, while ensuring it isn’t something that would go straight to the junk folder.
When writing your emails, it’s best not to go overboard. Users tend not to scroll too far to read to the end, which means offers or promotions might be overlooked. Keep your content succinct and relevant so your readers aren’t put off.
Email is an ideal channel for distributing curated content that’s tailored to your audience too, such as industry news and research, videos, podcasts or recent blog posts. It not only improves your brand authority but also helps educate your audience on matters relating to your industry.
Keep it action-focused
Your emails are designed to encourage your customers to take action, such as clicking on a link to a specific page or buying a product. These Call-to-Actions need to be concise, direct, and persuasive. Some powerful examples might be ‘shop now’, ‘learn more’, ‘read more’, or ‘buy today’.
It might be tempting to include as many of these links as possible to grow your business. But too many can be overwhelming to your readers and they won’t know which one to follow. Instead, keep the use of CTA links to a minimum and make them prominent so it’s obvious where to click.
Use high quality images
Images are just as powerful as the content and CTA. They help clearly convey the message you’re trying to send to your target audience and make the email more interesting and attention-grabbing overall.
Like CTAs, less is more when it comes to images. However, every image you include needs to be relevant to the topic and high quality – most subscribers who see a blurry or broken image in an email won’t continue reading. With this in mind, make sure your header image is as clear as possible since this is the first thing the user sees.
Optimise for mobile
With a growing percentage of subscribers reading their emails on a mobile device, it comes as no surprise that your newsletters need to be responsive. Yet many emails are designed on and for desktops exclusively, which makes viewing them on a mobile much harder.
Make sure that any emails you send out to your subscriber list have been designed to work on all devices, and check how they display before you hit send. You want to ensure that any images or videos used resize appropriately, CTAs are visible, and the content is adapted so the email isn’t too long.
Make it personal
It’s important to understand how personalising a subject line or targeting segmented subscribers can affect open and click rates. Your readers feel more relevant and valued when the email is targeted to them. At the very least, this means your emails should be tailored to include the reader’s name but also include promotions or offers segmented just for them to encourage engagement.
Email marketing remains an incredibly important tool that can help your business generate more enquiries, and boost sales. At Artemis, we have many years of digital marketing experience and can provide expert help to enable your business to reach a broader audience of new and existing customers. Get in touch with us today to arrange a free consultation and find out more.
