Email marketing is probably the most underutilized marketing channel. With the introduction and transparency of paid advertising, the lack of immediate revenue generated from email marketing has forced it to take a back seat in the minds of some business owners and marketers. They call email marketing “antiquated” and “dead”.
Email marketing is actually one of the higher converting marketing channels out there. For every dollar spent on email marketing, you can expect to receive $36 dollars returned on investment compared to only $4 return on ad spend for every dollar spent with paid ads.
In this blog article, we will go more into detail about why email marketing is not dead, and three best practices you need to do to make the most out of email marketing strategy for your business.
Email Marketing Isn’t Dead
One of the most common claims you may hear from a digital marketer or business executive is that email marketing is dead. “Email marketing is an outdated practice”, and “people have moved on to app notifications and receiving text messages”.
This is half true. Yes, there are many new ways to readily retain the attention of your customers, but none have been proven more effective than email marketing.
Email marketing is going to play a larger role in the digital marketing landscape in the next coming years due to the emphasis on data privacy. With data privacy rules and technology being put into place now more than ever, the digital marketer has a very limited amount of tools in the toolbox to acquire new customers in a data-compliant manner.
Paid media campaigns on Facebook and Google are greatly being affected by the death of the cookie and IOS.15. Right now, there is no better time to jump on the email marketing bandwagon.
Email marketing allows you to capture a user’s information, and target them directly in their inbox without really having to jockey for a position amongst competition while wasting ad dollars.
Email marketing on that fact alone cannot be declared dead. It has a place more than ever in the digital marketing landscape.
Best Practices For A Successful Email Marketing Strategy
Segment Your Email List
The first thing to consider when creating an email marketing campaign strategy is your audience. The audience should be the most important consideration because they are going to be the ones interacting with the email and it’s your job to nurture them through the marketing funnel.
A measure you need to take is figuring out a way to segment your email list. Unfortunately, a blanket message won’t appeal to every single person on your list. For example, if you are a car company and obtained email information from prospective car buyers and emailed them about an offer about only selling yellow cars, you would have eliminated 86% of your audience. That 86% of your email list might have been interested in the other 6 colors of the color spectrum.
Interest Based Segmentation
One method to segment your audience as described in the previous paragraph is by interest. If you have multiple product offers, you might want to create lead generation forms for each of your products or have a single lead generation form with one of the prompts being “I would be interested in learning more about…” with a dropdown of your products or services. The whole goal here is for you to be able to send specific messages to audiences who have specific interests.
Actives Engagers vs Inactive Engagers
The next suggested method to segment your email list is by active contacts and inactive contacts. When sending emails, you’ll realize that there is a segment of your audience that interacts consistently with your emails and others that don’t interact with them at all.
In order to receive the best metrics and chances of conversions from email, it is suggested that you keep your active list as large as possible. You can categorize your active contact as someone that simply opens your email, or you can get even more granular and require an open and a click.
For inactive contacts, I would recommend setting the option as the contact receiving a month’s worth of emails (at minimum 4 emails) and not engaging with any of them. I would set them to receive a final email asking them if they are still interested in receiving emails or if they would like to unsubscribe. Constantly sending email receipts not engaging with your emails will skew your metrics and has the potential in messing up your sending reputation amongst the email service providers.
Don’t Flood Your Audience With Emails
Non-Transactional Emails
The quick answer to how often you should send non-transactional emails is no more than 3 emails per week. Anything over 3 emails and you will be running the risk of losing people due to unsubscribes.
Sending a large number of emails per week isn’t going to necessarily drive up conversions. Spacing out emails and giving the recipient time to digest and absorb the information is probably the best practice. You want to come off as a brand that can be trusted and not too pushy or desperate for attention.
For email newsletters, sending once a month is appropriate. This gives you plenty of time to curate content to populate the newsletter instead of having to rely on outside sources to complete the newsletter. Using outside sources is not a bad thing, but using outside sources as a primary driver of your newsletter defeats the purpose of your email because you won’t be driving traffic to your content. You’ll be driving traffic to your competitors.
Behavior Based Emails
If you are sending behavior related emails like abandoned cart emails, you can be a little bit more aggressive with your emails because the odds of conversion are very high.
For abandoned cart emails, I would still recommend sending only 3 emails (once every other day) with a gradual increase in offer like an email that includes a heavy discount. However, based on user engagement you may want to send more emails especially if it’s a time sensitive event like a website sale coming to an end.
Pick an Optimal Time to Send Your Email
The best time to send an email totally depends on the testing you perform and the audience you’re sending to. You should test various send times and see which ones perform the best.
B2C Audiences
You don’t want to send too late at night or first thing in the morning because the email recipient won’t be awake to look at the email. By the time they do reach your email, it may be sandwiched in between many other emails because the common practice amongst brands is to send emails first thing in the morning.
As for the day of the week, Monday and Friday are probably some of the worst days to send emails. People’s inboxes are often flooded with messages from over the weekend on Mondays. On Fridays, people are checking out for the weekend and may not give their inbox any attention. Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are very solid days to send your emails to your audience.
B2B Audiences
Typically, the best results for B2B audiences tend to be before and after lunchtime. Office workers spend the email morning checking and clearing their inboxes. Right before or after lunch is a great time because their inboxes will be cleared out and your message will be right in front of them.
Conclusion
Email marketing is a channel that every business can benefit from using. Your return on ad spend is much higher than that of paid advertising because you are speaking directly to an audience already familiar with your brand and products. If you segment your audience and send your emails to your audience that is not intrusive and is considerate of their attention, you’ll be in great shape.
