Email Marketing Is Alive And Doing Better Than Ever

Irony!

I just received an email that was promoting a blog post that was proclaiming that email marketing is dead! Are you kidding me? Well, as you can imagine, this got me thinking about the whole email marketing is dead debate that has been going on for at least 10 years that I can think of. So I’ve decided to take you on this little journey of email marketing tips.

I did a quick search on Google for the phrase email marketing dead and received over 205,000 results

Really?!?!

I can’t believe after all of the years, articles, and surveys that there are still people that are claiming that it’s just a matter of time before email will no longer be used for marketing!

It’s hard to believe that so many people can be so wrong for so long.

Some Facts

Well, after all, I couldn’t just go back to what I was doing, I had to get the facts! eMarketer recently published results from a couple of surveys on the value and the ROI of email marketing. The results are really pretty impressive.

• Email has a median ROI of 122% ~ (Direct Marketing Assoc. and Demand Metric)
• 80% of in-house and marketing agency marketers say tactic best able to provide a strong ROI ~ (eConsultancy)
• Same eConsultancy group said email marketing contributes to 23% of total sales while only 16% of overall marketing budget ~ (eConsultancy)
• 13% Increase in overall revenues generated from email marketing ~ (Relevancy Group)

Another fact that was published by eMarketer was that in a survey done by Epsilon (an email provider) open rates on their platform in North America are around 33.3% and deliverable rates at 95.6%. These numbers are huge! When was the last time you saw a campaign that had 33% of the people exposed to the campaign actually look at it?

Email Marketing Tips

Now, I’ll be the first to say that if an email campaign is going to see these kinds of numbers then it has to be done correctly! The days of batch-and-blast are long gone. If you’re not performing regular maintenance on your list, segmenting the messages that you are sending based on your list, and providing information that your audiences want to hear, you will never even approach these numbers.

But, do it right and the email channel will provide your company or organization with a lot of great success. Here are some email marketing tips for doing it right.

But what does “doing it right” mean?

The answer to that is complicated. Every business and every audience are going to be very unique. But, there are some basics that everyone should be doing to make sure that your email efforts are going to maximize results.

• Stop Using Gmail!: Stop sending email marketing from your Gmail account! In fact, if you are in business, stop using a Gmail account altogether! There are a lot of reasons why you shouldn’t be using Gmail but here are a couple of strong reasons.

  First, you’re limited to the number of sends/per day that Google will give you. In fact, here it is right from the horse’s mouth: In an effort to fight spam and prevent abuse, Google will temporarily disable your account if you send messages to more than 500 recipients

  Next, you’re going to increase the likelihood of being blocked by spam filters. ISP’s are very suspicious of bulk email sent via Gmail accounts…

Whew, glad I got that off my chest

• Segment:Divide up your email list into categories that make sense for the people that are in your list. There are, again, a lot of ways that you can do this and it’s going to depend on how your company goes to market. Some of the ways to segment could be geographical, demographically, by gender, past purchases (either what was purchased or how long ago a purchase was made), or my favorite (a bit tougher to do) is to segment based on their stage in their buying process.

  Once you have the people segmented, now make sure that all of the emails that you are going to send to them are highly relevant to the people that are receiving the message.

• Educate:Don’t try to generate a sale with every single email message that you send out! Take time to educate your audience on why you do what you do the way that you do it (there has to be a song lyric in there somewhere). Especially if you have a complicated sell cycle. The more complicated or expensive the product or service that you have, the more important education is to your customers.

  If you take the time to help them learn about your product or service the chances are going to be higher that they are going to buy from you, with fewer objections when they end up at the bottom of the sales funnel.

• Don’t Forget About Mobile:According to Campaign Monitor“email opens on mobile devices have grown an incredible 30% over the past 5 years”. That’s huge! If you’re not using an email template that is mobile responsive, you’re losing a huge part of your audience. Because they are not going to work to try to read your email…they will just delete it.

This Is Tough! Marketing Automation Helps!

Yes it is. But there are no shortcuts, especially when it comes to digital marketing and especially email marketing. But, there are tools and systems that will make this a lot easier. marketing automation is one of the greatest time savers and highest performing marketing channels that we’ve seen in a very long long time and will really lighten up the work involved with a solid email marketing process.