Lots of entrepreneurs view email marketing as a relic from a bygone era. While email marketing has been about for a long time, it remains a valuable marketing tool. Here are just five reasons why we think that email marketing is still worth investing in.
Keep Your Brand at the Forefront of Your Audience’s Mind
One of the biggest advantages of having emails from your business arriving in customers’ inboxes on a regular basis is that it ensures that your brand is always on their mind. Most of us either check our emails every day or we receive push notifications when a new email arrives. In either case, most of us will at least see new emails that have arrived even if we don’t read them.
If you’re anything like us, you receive automated emails from businesses whose newsletters you have subscribed to, even if you don’t read them religiously. But the point here is that you don’t even need your audience to open and read those emails in order for you both to benefit from them. If you send out emails once a week to your subscribers, that means that at least once a week they will be thinking about your business. In the long-term, this makes your business hard for them to forget.
Enhance Your Brand Recognition
Building an instantly recognisable brand is a long and arduous journey; there are no shortcuts here. There are only a handful of brands throughout human history that have grown to such prominence that their names become synonymous with the industries they operate in. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is Google, whose name has now become a verb.
Of course, you cannot build this kind of brand recognition on the back of email marketing alone. But if you do it right, your email marketing can definitely improve your brand recognition and augment your other marketing efforts.
Regardless of how big or small your business is when you begin your email marketing campaign, with the right approach, you can grow your brand recognition at a surprisingly high rate. Remember, email marketing gives you a direct line to your audience’s inboxes – you can control the message that they see. If you are able to continually deliver useful high-quality content, you will have an advantage over your competitors.
Receive Valuable Feedback
One thing that you will often notice in the small print of automated emails that you receive is a note telling you that there is no point replying to the email as the address it is sent from is not monitored. This has become standard practice, to the point where many businesses don’t even consider the alternative – but there might be real value in choosing to receive and read feedback from your subscriber list.
Feedback is always valuable to any conscientious business. When your customers are directly telling you what they do and don’t like about your brand, you don’t have to do any guesswork or undertake potentially expensive and time-consuming market research.
Instead of including a note telling your readers that they shouldn’t bother replying to your automated emails, why not invite them to do just that and offer you any feedback that they have?
Keep Your Customers Informed
With bulk email software, whenever there is important news about your business that you want to share with your audience, you have an easy means of doing so. Naturally, we assume that we will put any important announcements on the business website. However, your customers aren’t necessarily going to be checking back on your website. Even if many of them use your website to buy things from you, they may well have bookmarked the relevant product pages and will skip completely over any announcements on your front page.
However, with an automated email, you can capture their attention with the subject line and then ensure that any important news is prominently displayed within the email itself. Email marketing makes it possible to keep your customers informed and up-to-date in a way that no other marketing channel can quite match.
Retain Your Subscriber Count
Your email subscriber count is a pretty good metric to use in determining whether your business remains relevant to your audience. If your subscriber count is in a slow but prolonged climb, it implies that people are losing interest in your business. Remember, lots of people on your mailing list may have stopped caring about your emails, but to actually take the extra step of unsubscribing from your mailing list implies that they are not just ambivalent about your business, but actively moving away from it.
As long as you make your emails both useful and engaging, you should be able to maintain a steady subscriber count, if not continually raise it.
Email marketing might seem like an old-fashioned way of doing things, but it is actually a valuable tool to have. Email marketing enables you to regularly communicate with your audience and keep them up to date, as well as receive valuable feedback.
