What is Email Marketing?

In simple words, email marketing is the practice of sending commercial or promotional emails to your contacts for marketing purposes. Remember that such contacts must have expressly agreed to receive such emails from you; otherwise, you risk spamming them.

Because emails are personal, email marketing ranks ahead of other marketing channels like affiliate marketing and social media marketing. You can have one-on-one communication with your audience to build a community, inform them about new brand launches, share significant developments, and drive sales. However, it’s best to hire the services of digital marketing agencies that specialize in this subtle but highly effective form of marketing.

7 Reasons Why Email Marketing is Important to Your Content Strategy

Email marketing can boost your company’s content strategies to the next level. Adding email marketing to the mix lets you connect with your audience directly through their inbox.

Here are some reasons why you should include email marketing in your content strategy.

1. Emails generate better results than most marketing channels.    

Among marketing channels, email marketing has produced the highest return on investment (ROI) for the last 10 years. Also, it has the highest conversion rate (66%) for promotional message purchases.

When you spend $1 on email marketing, you can earn up to $44, with almost 4.3% of shoppers buying from these campaigns. Plus, compared with social media, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers.

2. Emails help with customer engagement and retention

Connect with your customers by collecting their email addresses and getting their consent to include them in your email advertising campaigns. Promotional emails are perfect for educating your audience and presenting your offers without being too pushy or intrusive.  

You can use these tips to reach out to your customers using email marketing.

• Make your email marketing content powerful. It needs to be value-laden if you want to retain your customers. For example, you can share tips and tricks, how your product solves its problems, its features, and best uses, etc.
• Diversify your email content with interactive formats. For example, insert GIFs, videos, infographics, and different newsletter layouts.
• Keep your subject lines brief and to the point. Be direct or ask questions that rouse their curiosity. This will increase open rates.  

3 Emails compel your audience to take action.

Use marketing emails to influence your target audience to take action on your offers. Let’s say you sent an email with a video tutorial of your product kit. At the bottom of your email, ask your subscribers to click the “Buy Now” button to buy your product.

To sweeten the deal, you can even offer a massive discount to whoever clicks your call-to-action (CTA) button and makes the purchase on the same day.

You may also apply these email marketing strategies to make your messages more compelling.

• Make your CTA buttons stand out with bright colors, and keep your text short and actionable.
• Make sure your CTA buttons lead to a landing page rather than your homepage.
• Perform split tests to analyze which email versions bring better conversions, click-throughs, opens, and other desired actions.

4. Emails improve brand awareness.

Use emails to help your customers understand your brand. By talking about your values, mission, products, services, etc., your audience will have a clear idea of what your brand is all about. Your customers will be more likely to advocate for your brand if they have a better understanding of it.

Consider these tips when sending emails to boost brand awareness.

• Always add your company name and logo to increase brand recall and association.
• Make your messages memorable and unique.
• Maintain consistent branding throughout your emails to increase recognition and attract customers.

5. Personalise your content

Instead of sending generic emails, create content that’s relevant to your recipients’ interests, shopping activities, and other relevant factors. Get clues about their interests by looking into products they viewed, items added to carts and wishlists, items purchased, blog posts read, etc.

Also, study your email marketing funnels to send relevant content to your customers based on where they are in the buying cycle. You can use email automation software programs that let you send specific messages based on customer activities.  

For example, set your email software to send welcome emails to every shopper who signs up for your newsletter. You can also send abandoned cart emails to people who added items to their virtual carts but didn’t complete their purchases.

Setting behavior-based triggers makes email communication more effective because your subscribers feel the content you send is made specifically for them. 

6. Emails can bring loads of traffic to your website.

Let’s face it: Even your most loyal customers only visit your website sometimes. It’s not that they aren’t interested in your content; they just have other things to do.

This is where email marketing comes in.

Use emails to remind your audience of your brand and show a preview of your website content. You can also send summaries of your new blog posts and guide your customers to read the full post by clicking on the title.     

7. Emails seamlessly integrate with your other marketing channels. 

Emails help amplify other channels in your integrated marketing campaign, such as social media marketing, content marketing, etc. For example, you can place clickable social media icons on your newsletter’s footer and embed your social media posts in your emails.

That way, your customers can follow your social media profiles.   

Emails are also perfect for promoting your webinars and sharing more information about them. Whatever marketing campaign you’re running, you can always use email to reinforce it. That’s how versatile the channel is.

Remember these tactics when using email marketing to complement your integrated marketing campaigns.

• Be consistent with your branding across all channels.
• Insert social media buttons and website links to engage your audience on other platforms. 
  

Final Words                 

Email marketing will still be important in 2023. It can boost your sales, improve customer engagement, establish your brand image, and more.

Don’t think twice about investing in email marketing. You’re bound to see the positive impact email marketing can bring to your business using the tips covered in this guide.