Navigating the Email Marketing Economy
Brian Wallace, Founder & President, NowSourcing
Electronic mail is far from dead. In four years from now, we will be sending 361 billion emails per day, and the most proficient companies are raking in 4,400% ROIs for every $1 they spend on email marketing.
Oddly enough, consumers seem to love it. In fact, email marketing has been found to influence an increase in customer spending. Shoppers spend 138% more money with a brand after receiving exclusive email offers. This can be a great selling point in getting more customers to sign up for your newsletters. After all, 31% of marketing professionals have said email newsletters are their best way to nurture leads.
On top of that, recipients rarely flag marketing emails as spam. In the rare case a recipient does mark an email as spam, it's likely because the customer was auto-enrolled after a purchase or website visit, the marketer is emailing without permission, or the marketer has neglected their subscriber for a long period of time.
As a remedy, simply ask your customers to opt-into your email groups and explain the benefits of doing so. Benefits could include exclusive offers, discounts, and more. As long as you keep your email exchanges profession - i.e. not buying email addresses or hiding your unsubscribe link - you should see slightly greater success than your infrequent counterparts.
Another way you can get ahead in email marketing is to use an email marketing provider. Mailchimp is a great example of an email marketing provider with a fleet of features and few limitations.
Mailchimp is free for up to 2,000 contacts, and allows users to send up to 12,00 emails per month. On top of that, Mailchimp offers an easy drag-and-drop editing system and a large library of templates. Mailchimp also has a database of over 100 apps, including Salesforce and WordPress. Small errors you may run into using Mailchimp are its minimal reporting and analytical features and limited segmentation based on geolocation.
When searching for an email marketing platform, it's best to look for a service offering list segmentation based on geolocation and customer interests, as well mobile optimization for mobile-friendly editing, reporting, and email templates. Also of importance, your email marketing provider should provide app integrations - such as Mailchimp does - to platforms such as Wordpress and any sort of customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Today, marketers have a wide variety of email marketing platforms to choose from. Which option is best for you?
About the Author: Brian Wallace is the Founder and President of NowSourcing, an industry leading infographic design agency in Louisville, KY and Cincinnati, OH which works with companies ranging from startups to Fortune 500s. Brian runs #LinkedInLocal events, hosts the Next Action Podcast, and has been named a Google Small Business Adviser for 2016-present. Follow Brian Wallace on Linked
