Checking the mail is a staple in every household. Whether it's waiting for a package slip, a bill, the flyers or perhaps something else, everyone checks almost every day.
Email Marketing is the same idea but online, through direct emails. Essentially, email advertising allows you to promote the most important aspects of your business whether that be a product or a service and deliver information relevant to your customers that will strengthen and build on that relationship.
Provide Value in Each Email Sent
When a customer seeks you out and trusts you to have their personal email account, they are asking to start a correspondence with you.
They feel deep enough about your brand that they are willingly providing a form of direct communication and many businesses don’t treat that with the respect it deserves.
By starting that relationship and pathway for communication, the prospect is openly looking for engagement and information pertaining to your business. So give it to them. Put yourselves in the shoes of the email recipient. Ask yourself, “Is this providing some type of value?”.
Educate & Provide Actionable Offers
Some of the most popular tactics seen in successful email marketing campaigns use their time in front of prospects to either educate and inform or provide a direct, actionable offer.
Educate and Inform
Email marketing to directly inform and educate prospects who haven’t purchased can be a way to warm them up and guide them along the buyer’s journey to become loyal brand ambassadors.
Conversely, email marketing can also be used to educated customers who’ve already purchased to develop their relationship and the businesses can become a voice of authority in their industry.
For example; a Gym’s email marketing strategy could be to send emails sent containing fitness tips such as healthy meal schedules, gym equipment how-to guides, the health benefits of using the sauna and more.
Provide Direct Offers
Like the weekly flyers, an effective email strategy could simply be showing customers about sales happening in-store and online.
It's difficult for businesses to stand out, even when they have a great product or service at a great price. Providing your best weekly or monthly offers direct to your customers' inboxes gives them the info they want without you sharing the spotlight.
To go along with the gym example used above, an example of this would be providing a coupon for 15% off on all water bottles purchased on the company's online store.
Email Marketing Vs. Mailers
Email marketing has several benefits not seen in traditional forms of mailers such as the weekly flyers, promo postcards, brochures etc. The time-sensitive nature, customer ability to opt-in/out of receiving communications, data collection and customer database all keep email head and shoulders above physical mailers.
Time Sensitivity
Advertising via direct mail introduces the variability of when messages are delivered. Typically, having a 2-3 day window for mailers to drop is common which forces the offers and promotions to be more limited. Knowing what time of day messages are consumed is not possible to control or even become aware of, leaving little opportunity to control when promotional messages are consumed.
Email marketing gives complete control over the timeliness of your messages. For example, if a business had an overstock of a particular product they wanted to sell over the weekend, they could send out an email on Friday morning and instantly have that message viewed by thousands of qualified customers.
Customer Opt-in
Direct mail is delivered on a postal code basis. This means postcards are going to everyone in a selected area. Email lists can be edited and changed to keep contacts grouped together properly and is only containing those interested in staying in the loop. If along the way, they feel they do not want to continue seeing emails, they can easily unsubscribe themselves from future communication.
Data Analysis
Online Ads allow us to capture enormous amounts of data that can be analyzed to make them better. By analyzing the data across campaigns, you are able to isolate certain aspects to test a particular hypothesis and replicate its successes. You can test different times of days, different promotions and much more due to the vast amount of data collected from advertising online. Direct mail has few metrics to analyze for improvement and you are left guessing for the most part to determine the effectiveness and the reasons for it.
Customer Database
Having a database of your most loyal customers will open up a pathway to mass communication instantly. Everyone you would want to see that message, just got a notification on their phone or desktop computer that you sent that message. Unlike traditional mailers, you won't have to compete for space, it's your branding and you can give them avenues to continue that relationship on your website or social channel.
Bottom Line
Customers want to know what you’re up to and they want to be able to access current sales and stay up to date with their favourite businesses. By adapting to how they spend their time and advertising to them online, you’re able to put yourself in winning positions to take over their attention and increase brand awareness. Email marketing is another great method of advertising and has a place being a major feature of a complete marketing strategy to be utilized by businesses of all sizes.