Email is so ubiquitous, so prevalent that it’s easy to take for granted. It’s part of all our everyday lives – even those who don’t think of themselves as particularly computer savvy have email accounts.
And that’s precisely why email shouldn’t be over-looked as a marketing medium – it’s so common we often discount it as a valuable marketing medium. The launch of Google’s latest brainchild, Customer Match, highlights how important email marketing is and will continue to be. Google’s new tool will match brands' lists of customers' email addresses with people's Google accounts to target search, YouTube and Gmail ads.
nine out of ten people check their email every single day
Think about it, how many times have you checked your email today? In fact, how many email accounts do you have? 1, 2, 3 – maybe more.
Did you know that nine out of ten people check their email every single day? That means that email is the one medium you can be pretty sure your customers will be looking at on any given day.
Email marketing facilitates a direct connection with your customers.
Assuming you’re playing ball with the anti-spam rules, your customer has elected to receive your news and offers. They’ve invited you to communicate with them!
Email marketing allows us to send a bulk mail on a personal level
We can use mail merge to fill names, and use other segmentation factors to adapt each email for each recipient based on what we know about them.
Email marketing is relatively cheap
Compared to say TV or Radio and it gives you a great reach, and if your database is well maintained, a great ROI.
Tracking
Now this is where email marketing really comes into its own. You can tell who opened your email, how many times they opened it, what they clicked, what they didn’t click. All of that allows you to further segment, refine and follow up with more specific offers or information. Tracking capabilities give us instant results which means A/B testing is a cinch!
So now that we’ve highlighted the benefits of email marketing, what are the various types of campaign you can run?
- Automated one-off emails, such as event reminders or alerts
- New product announcements
- In-store sales promotions
- Online sales promotions
- Related goods
- Exclusive Birthday and loyalty offers
- Seasonal opening hours & offers
- Life Hacks – how your products can be used in quirky ways to great advantage
- Thought leadership / Industry news
No matter which type of email you decide to send, always start with your CTA … but that’s the subject of a whole other blog post…watch this space.
