Email Is Still One Of The Most Effective Marketing Channels Available
Let’s be honest, we’re all pretty active on social media. For many of us, it’s our first stop whenever we wake up in the morning. And for the rest of us, it’s usually a quick check after getting off work to see what’s going on.
But what about those of us who aren’t on social media? For the majority of business owners, this is a worrying demographic. According to HubSpot Blogs’ research, only 41% of American adults between the ages of 18 and 24 use social media. So it would appear that there are tens of millions of people out there who still prefer to be digital natives rather than digital immigrants.
Despite this, email marketing still reigns supreme as one of the most effective marketing channels available. According to HubSpot Blogs’ research, 87% of American adults between the ages of 18 and 24 use email, as compared to 75% of adults between 25 and 34, and 68% of adults aged 35+. What’s more, 80% of American adults have either received or watched an email marketing video in the last month.
So rather than just seeing email as a channel for spam, we should be celebrating its uniqueness as a way of reaching people.
The Rising Importance of Video In Email Marketing
In its simplest form, email marketing is the practice of sending messages to people who have given their permission to receive them. However, in practice, it’s a bit more involved. Here are a few of the more advanced email marketing tactics professionals use.
Video In Email Marketing
To find the sweet spot between engaging the audience and annoying your followers, you need to integrate video into your email marketing strategy.
You can use a tool like Zapier to integrate a call to action with a video, inviting viewers to click through to a webpage. Or you can use a service like Hello Fresh to integrate a recipe with a promotional video, encouraging audience to try a new dish.
You can also use a tool like Sumo to create a shopping cart for your products, integrating product demos with short video pitch, encouraging viewers to buy now.
If you’re just getting started with video in email marketing, start with short videos for mobile users and use a tool like IFTT (If This, Then That) to create automated email campaigns based on specific actions or events.
Personalization Is The Key To Successful Email Marketing
Personalization makes email marketing much more effective as a marketing tool, offering a way to make each interaction with a potential customer more relevant and valuable. With personalization, you can create automated emails based on previous actions and behaviors of the audience. So if someone visited your website or browsed your product pages on social media, you can use that data to create campaigns tailored to that person’s interests.
To give you an example, say you’re a hair care company and you notice your female audience spends a lot of time on social media, particularly Instagram. You can create tailor-made Instagram stories and videos, inviting your audience to try your new hair product or service, and follow you on social media to get the latest updates.
You can also use data from one of your websites to create personalized emails, tailoring content to reflect that site’s audience, such as using ZoomInfo to generate leads for a travel agency.
The idea is to create relationships with your audience, encouraging them to engage with your brand, instead of just broadcasting information.
Live Events And Offline Events
With the potential to reach a massive audience, online events are a must for any marketer’s toolkit. But live events and offline events are still essential to a full marketing strategy. What’s more, many events, such as Oktoberfest, Santa Claus events, and Christmas parties, are a great way to promote your product during a time when people are already inclined to be more receptive to sales pitches.
You can use an event management tool like GetOnMe to help you plan your upcoming events and to connect you with event professionals, including photographers, web designers, and more. With GetOnMe, you can create a free account and start planning your events, connecting with local businesses that you can potentially partner with, and boosting your digital presence in the process.
Offline events are when you meet face to face, either in real life or in digital space. You can use these events to educate and inform your audience about your product, as well as to demonstrate your dedication to the industry. While live events give you the opportunity to engage with prospective customers, offline events give you the chance to connect with existing customers and show them how much you value their business.
Mobile Is The Key To Reaching The Masses
With more than 75% of American adults using mobile phones to access the internet, marketing professionals should take this into account when designing their strategies. Your website, social media, and even email, can be accessed from mobile phones, so it’s essential that your marketing material is readable on small screens. And this means, in practice, that you need to create smaller versions of your standard website pages, using lightweight templates that can be loaded quickly on mobile devices.
The idea is to create material that doesn’t feel too overwhelming for mobile users, who, as we’ve established, are already inclined to be wary of large websites with dozens of pages. You don’t need to make major changes to your website’s design to accommodate mobile users, as there are numerous free tools like Bootstrap, which can make your site look a bit more like a mobile phone. And don’t forget to test your material on different devices to see how it fares, as different screen sizes and hardware features can affect how websites and apps look.
Email Marketing Is Vastly Underutilized
Even though email marketing is such an effective tool for generating leads, it’s often overlooked by busy marketers seeking to grow their businesses.
If you’re looking for a way to generate leads, you can try out marketing automation software, which can help you to schedule email campaigns and send out autoresponders on demand, tracking the results of your campaigns in real time.
With email marketing, you can also segment your audience and send out personalized emails, using tools like HubSpot to engage with subscribers, grow your lists, and gain more customers.
So what’s stopping you from trying out email marketing? If you believe it’s difficult to design and send effective emails, you might be right. Luckily, it’s a task that can be simplified with a bit of automation, creating a lead generation machine that can handle the most basic email marketing needs of a business.