As we discussed in our previous article, Email marketing: Why use it?, email customers are 11 percent more valuable than the average customer and organic-search customers are 50 percent more valuable. This statement covers two important strategies that every business should engage: email marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). Today, we will be covering the profit potential of email marketing, SEO will be for another day.
So what is the primary element needed to start an email marketing campaign?
Email addresses.
According to Marketing Sherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Survey, 92% of respondents said that email is producing, or eventually will produce, a positive ROI for them. The survey also shows that most marketers aren’t giving email capture and marketing the attention it deserves. Only 17% of respondents say their lists are growing significantly, and a third of marketers report that their lists are not growing at all or are even shrinking. If you feel like the above marketers, focus your strategy on growing the email lists. It makes sense: if no new emails are captured, how can the business grow?
If email marketing produces a positive ROI, why are so many marketers not making the cut?
According to the report, 83% of marketers are overlooking the importance of tracking (and testing) their email marketing and metrics. From here, there is old adage that we all must remember: The devil is in the details. We have discussed this in previous articles but test, test and more test. It reduces fixing and time costs, eliminates mistakes and gives customers peace of mind knowing that any technology provided by your company works.
Here are a few tips to make an email marketing profitable:
- Make emails mobile-compatible – Everyone has a mobile phone and they use it. Everyday. Here is a scary statistic that should jolt you into mobile compatibility: 69.7% of consumers immediately delete emails that don’t render well on a mobile device. If an email does not render properly on a phone, you are losing money.
- Segment the customers – Segmentation is a powerful tool in marketing and helps focus marketing messages with precision and accuracy. Test and try group your customers in various ways to find what is most effective (sign-up date, geography, behavioral data, demographics, etc).
- Format and length – Keep your emails short and concise. Have a clear message and goal to each and every email. However, test the format that best resonates with your customers.
- Voice – Speak in the voice of your company’s culture. Is it more professional or friendly? Test with various styles and see what produces the best results.
- Time – test and find the times when people open their emails. The standard times are before 8 a.m. and around 9 p.m. People have a tendency to check personal emails before they begin working and before they go to bed.
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