When it comes to digital marketing, making use of emails is a great way to create leads, convert them into warm leads and eventually sales. There are over 2 billion email accounts in the world today, given the reality that one person may own several accounts but only use one or two of those active accounts.
Does Your Email Marketing Stand Out From The Competition?
According to a 2018 Radicati Group study, there’ll be an estimate of more than 3.8 billion email users by the start of 2019. That being said, the chance of reaching a broader audience for potential leads through email is a possibility. However, some of those email accounts which aren’t entirely active, may not receive the updates and newsletters that you send, which may contradict how many people you could reach simply based on estimates.
Why is Email Marketing a Big Deal?
Given the statistics mentioned earlier, and with ample access to the world of the internet, it’s safe to say that email marketing is a positive way to promote your business. It also plays an important role as part of the business digital marketing strategy by being able to reach more potential customers and increasing the chances of sales opportunity.
Due to it being one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing, a business is able to reach more people at much less than using TV advertisements and other forms of advertising expenses.
Is Your Email Marketing Campaign Losing Effectiveness?
The outcome of a good email marketing campaign depends on how effectively you can nurture your leads. Yes, there are several tools to help you with this process but you also need to be stubborn with dedication.
Email is a way to connect with your prospects.
To nurture your leads means you’ll have to consistently follow up with your customers who already made purchases. You want to stay in the loop of how they are doing and how well the product works for them. This can even come as a survey sent via an email as well as several other ways.
Some nurturing methods may include welcoming your client to the program and this is usually a mandatory email in the form of “thanks for signing up”. Making them feel worth more than simply a number in the market is crucial as many people appreciate a personal approach.
Once you’ve set up your tools for your email campaign, there are certain natural aspects that could occur, such as questions the client or customer may have related to the new product/program/service. Sometimes a business owner will choose to frequently keep their customers up to date with emails which follow up with helpful tips and interesting information related.
Declining Open Rates
Is It All Even Worth It?
The open rate of emails can fall at any stage which inevitably will have an effect on whether or not it’s worth continuing with the campaign as part of your marketing strategy or not. The open rate is literally the estimated amount of people who open their emails over a set period. Marketing specialists calculate this by the number of emails opened by the total amount of email messages sent.
Why Do Open Rates Drop?
The open rate can be negatively affected by several factors including but not limited to:
- Opens cannot be accounted for if images weren’t downloaded or linked back to another website.
- Subject lines are not effective and interesting enough to get the reader to open the mail.
- The pre-header doesn’t interest the reader either.
- If the mail is unsolicited, the chances of it being opened at all are very slim.
Email Open Rates Have Dropped Across All Industries:
- Food and agriculture 24% open
- Artists and art 27% open
- Business and finance 20% open
- Construction 22% open
- Gambling 18% open
- Entertainment and events 21% open
- Home and garden 23% open
- Religion 26% open
- Sports 25% open
Pros:
Reach a Wider Audience
This is probably one of the “shiniest” perks of email marketing. The fact that you can reach more people than those within your market means that you have more opportunity to convert cold leads into warm leads and could end up converting them into sales.
Easy Access
Emails have become extremely versatile and a common choice of communication amongst many age groups.
Growing and maintaining your email list should be a top priority.
These days all mobile devices allow you to gain access to your emails so even when you’re on the go, you could get your marketing tactics to work for you and send off those marketing emails. Your leads are then able to access the emails via their mobile devices while they’re on the go.
Cost-Effective
When compared to other advertising and marketing strategies, email marketing is one of the most inexpensive ways to generate leads. Besides, it doesn’t even cost your potential leads a cent when they sign up for any newsletters. With this in mind it’s safe to say that, it’s a win-win for the business and the visitor to your website.
Keep Your Own Tabs
When using emails for marketing, you’ll be able to keep track of how they benefit you in the sense that you can check whether the email has been received, which clients are no longer subscribed as well as which email accounts are no longer active.
Reach Your Market Without Social Media
While Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Linkedin are great social media platforms for marketing, you can still reach your market and create leads using email marketing.
Drive Traffic To Your Website
Using emails as a strategy to generate traffic to your blog or website is quite effective. Why? They can entice the reader by giving them a snippet of the exciting post on your website. When they click on the link inside the mail, it means they automatically form part of your website traffic and improve the open rate.
Getting people to click “open” is the challenge.
Have Them Coming Back For More
This pro goes hand-in-hand with the traffic to your website because if your email is filled with useful content that relates to what your market or your reader is looking for, it’ll just be a matter of time and careful nurturing that part of these readers will convert to sales and remain subscribed.
Cons:
Not a Fan of Spam
Although emails can be great and informative, not everybody wants to be bogged down or relentlessly “hassled” with tons of emails a month even just 5 a month from the same business could pose an issue.
What’s more disturbing is the use of bulk emailing, as these usually end up in the user’s spam box where it may not even be discovered at all.
Minimal Reading
Sometimes people check the email subject line and don’t even bother to open the mail to read more. As mentioned in the first con of email marketing, when the mail goes to spam it may end up deleted before even being read.
Opt Out At Any Time
While having potential warm leads sign up to your email subscriptions, they can still choose to opt out and unsubscribe at any given time, which means you could lose that lead.
Cost
Mailechimp and similar email marketing providers have a paid subscription, so it will cost you to use this option in the long-run. In addition, you could outsource your email marketing to a digital marketing company, which would also need to be factored into your marketing budget. In the long run, however, outsourcing this function could save you loads of time.
Perfection Takes Time
While mailing tools can help a great deal, you still have to put in a lot of effort to make the email compelling to read and provide something of value to the reader.
It takes time to craft a compelling email marketing campaign.
You may not have the time to craft the emails for your market, so this will take time and practice to master before it becomes even more affective and beneficial to your business.
Competition
While email content marketing is so popular, they tend to come off as irritable and sometimes this can make the marketing opportunity even more challenging. Using emails alone does not guarantee that you’ll convert warm leads at all.
The Takeaway
Effective marketing strategies comes in many forms and, many businesses find email campaigns to be a good method of creating warm leads. However, the nurturing and commitment to convert these leads into sales takes time.
Email marketing has many benefits, but is by no means an easy pass to seeing overnight success. With time, learning the ins and outs of your provider and the tools associated will help you to do even better.
Despite declining open rates, email marketing still contributes greatly to converting prospects into purchasers, so continue to invest time and effort into crafting the most compelling email marketing campaigns possible.
