There are certainly a lot of advanced marketing concepts out there: SMS, social media, omnichannel marketing segmentation and artificial intelligence (AI) powered segmentation for a few of them. So, it's no wonder some people may thing that email marketing is on its way out. I've been hearing email is dead for years. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The fact is that email marketing remains at the very core of most digital-marketing tools. And even though it has been around for decades, it has kept up with the time and is still a top way to reach your customers. Just check out these stats:
Email marketing still has a massive reach with 4.3 billion people using email and more than 361.6 billion emails are sailing around every day. A study by EmailToolTester discovered that email-marketing's ROI (Return on Investment) is currently calculated to be 4,400%, or about $44 return on every dollar you spend in your marketing campaign.
The study also had some interesting statistics on what kinds of emails get the best return (how many were actually opened by potential customers). Welcome emails topped the list at 82.21% open rate, while triggered emails (fired by specific actions taken by website visitors) came in at 44.07%. One of the most popular forms of small business marketing, the newsletter, only came in at 20.48% - the lowest open rate.
That doesn't mean you should ignore newsletters. It just means that you need to learn how to optimize them, including personalization and autoresponders. They should also be optimized for the most popular email readers (those from Apple, Google, and Microsoft) and for mobile as well as desktop versions.
Many of the email marketing companies like Campaign Manager, Mailchimp, and GetResponse are all migrating to omnichannel marketing while keeping email as their main focus. What that means for the small business person is that you can start with email and then automatically switch to follow-up emails, social media engagements, or text marketing as your customer base changes.
Some tips for improving your email open rates:
DO:
- Personalize your subject lines
- Send your email when most people buy your products
- Use clear Calls to Actions right at the beginning of your email
- Write for mobile first and keep it short - use less text and clear headings
DON'T
- Use clickbait headlines - the body of what you are saying should be enough to get the click
- Forget your TOV - sounding like someone else can put you at risk of sounding scammy
- Ignore your results - use different metrics to measure how your email marketing performs to improve every time.
You can read the full report at emailtooltester.com/en/email-marketing-services/