Despite all the amazing tools available online, nothing beats the power of a cold email. An email marketing campaign can look simple and sleek, but its power comes from the fact that it can be customized to fit any business and can often reach customers where they’re most needed. Plus, once you’ve sent off that cold email, you can go back and forth with your prey, weaving more personalized interactions.
So, what exactly is a bounce rate? A bounce rate, or opt-in rate, is the percentage of people who open your email and click on a link to continue reading. To find out more, you can check out this helpful tutorial from HubSpot.com. Keep reading for some interesting figures about email marketing and how to optimize your strategy.
Why Email Marketing?
In 2018, email marketing will spend about 4.9 billion USD on advertising and marketing, according to the CAC Telesis and DMA reports. That’s a pretty penny. And what’s the return on investment (ROI)? Well, the CAC Telesis report cites a 60% ROI for advertising and marketing via email. The DMA report states that marketers see a 62% ROI from email marketing. Not bad for a little bit of advertising!
For a long time, traditional retail commerce (think: shopping malls) ruled the retail world. But as more consumers turn to online marketplaces, the importance of digital marketing and email marketing is becoming more and more crucial for every business.
The Impact of Email
Even if you only have a small business with just a few employees, you can still have an impact. That’s because of the exponentially increasing number of consumers who use email. In 2018, email will still account for 23.8% of all online searches, according to HubSpot.
In the United States, about 75% of the population uses email, according to Litmus. We could be fairly certain that at least half of those people actually read and understand the messages we send out. That’s a lot of potential customers!
Beyond the sheer scale of the market, email has other advantages. For instance, customers expect to receive marketing emails from brands they know and trust. As a result, when you send out a promotional email, you’re more likely to get a positive response.
The Growth Of Email Marketing
As more consumers gain their digital knowledge from online sources or through mobile apps, the importance of email marketing and digital marketing as a whole keeps increasing. Let’s take a quick look at the growth of email marketing over the past decade:
- According to HubSpot, the number of people using email for marketing and advertising purposes doubled between 2010 and 2018.
- 41% of consumers are more open to receiving marketing emails; 38% said they’d rather receive special offers via text message, while 29% prefer social media marketing; 10% prefer to search for deals online
- 56% of consumers use email for marketing, compared to 28% who use social media for marketing and 13% who use conventional, in-person marketing methods
- The CAC Telesis report forecasts email marketing will represent about 4.9% of total U.S. advertising and marketing budgets in 2018 (up from about 3.5% in 2017)
- DMA’s “Marketing to Men” report forecasts that by next year, email marketing will represent a $12.9 billion market share (up from about $7.2 billion in 2016)
- According to HubSpot, over 250 million American consumers were using email marketing software as of January 2018
How To Create A Successful Email Marketing Strategy
If you’re looking to get started with email marketing or want to improve your existing campaign, here are some tried and tested tips from industry experts.
Pick A Niche
One of the first things you should do is pick a niche. This is crucial because you’ll need to tailor your messaging to fit the needs of your audience. Before you know it, your list is growing and you’ve got new customers to thank you for.
If you’re completely unfamiliar with the concept of a niche, don’t worry, you’re not alone. In digital marketing and online marketing, a niche is a ‘small market or segment’ within the big market for advertising and/or marketing, as defined by the International Advertising Association (4A’s) in the United Kingdom. So, even if you’re advertising to the general public, you can still be very specific about what type of person you’re targeting.
Experiment With Different Headlines
When someone subscribes to your email list, you’ll often get the option to provide them with additional information about the products and/or services they’ve signed up for. This is known as the lead source and, as the name implies, can be used to source leads.
Often, the options are what you’d expect: a form to submit their contact details, a link to a website where they can do the same, or a simple thank you.
However, you can also use this space to try out different headlines, images, and/or offers to see which one is most effective. Some companies even provide you with A/B testing tools, so you can test different marketing approaches and choose the one that generates the most leads.
Personalize The Experience
Another crucial element of an effective email marketing campaign is to personalize the experience. A/B testing different versions of the same email can be used to identify the one that generates the most responses.
Sometimes, you’ll even have the opportunity to get a glimpse of their personal life, as the email will probably come with some form of a greeting or an introductory paragraph. This is where you can leverage your mailing list to the fullest and get even more out of each individual on your email marketing campaign.
Measure The Results Of Your Email Marketing Campaign
Although it goes without saying, it’s important to measure the results of your email marketing campaign. This doesn’t just relate to getting a sense of the number of sign-ups you’ve received but also the number of people who’ve opened the email and engaged with your messaging, whether they clicked on a link or took some other action.
Getting a handle on this information will help you see how others are interacting with your campaign and, more importantly, which version of the email is performing best, i.e. the one with the custom headings, images, and offers that you A/B tested.
An email that gets opened, for example, is crucial for a business. That’s because when someone opens an email, it usually means they’ve either (1) recognized the logo, (2) remembered the name of the company, or (3) are curious about what the email is about and want to find out more.