With so much chatter about new features and platforms in social media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that email marketing is no longer a strategy worth investing in during 2023. It’s certainly true that social media offers exciting opportunities in creative content production, collaborations and user-generated content. However, email marketing is still more cost-effective, targeted and offers impressive conversion rates.
Grab a cuppa and let’s look at 5 key reasons you should absolutely be investing in email marketing for your business.
1. Targeted reach is the calling card of email marketing
Always remember that the people on your email database have specifically agreed to receive content from your business (it’s important to note that they must be proactively opted in!), which means that they are already engaged and waiting to hear from you. Plus, with segmentation, you can target your customers based on demographics, behaviour and interests rather than casting a wider net on social media – your email database is already a collection of the right people open to receiving your message.
A great strategy to combine social and email is to convert your social media followers into email sign-ups with the draw of limited discounts and offers. Once captured in your database, you have a direct line of contact rather than hoping they see a social media post at a specific time on a specific day.
2. Email marketing has impressive and measurable results
According to Mailchimp, in 2022 the average open rate for emails was 20%, and click-through was around 3%. These figures put email marketing as a top-performing marketing channel – higher, in fact, than social media.
Similarly, the average conversion rate for emails is around 8% with social media coming in somewhere between 2-5%. This, of course, is a simplified figure that could be further examined by the goal of the content and the audience, but it shows why email marketing should still play a vital role in your strategy.
Furthermore, the measurability of emails is impressive – allowing us to track opens, clicks and optimise campaigns using this data over time.
3. Email marketing is cost-effective
We must give a quick nod to the low cost of email marketing – a few pennies in terms of design and spend when splitting it out across your database.
4. Certain audiences actually prefer it!
Depending on your target audience, email marketing may be more fitting for your customer base. If certain parts of your service are aimed towards older people; baby boomers and above, then social media is likely not the best way to reach them.
Similarly, it has been shown that consumers prefer business communications via email; HubSpot revealed that ‘73% of millennials prefer communications from businesses to come via email’ so that doesn’t just apply to older generations.
If you are involved in business-to-business marketing then certainly, email should be your channel of choice over social.
5. Email marketing allows for longer content
Email allows you to go into more detail in terms of content, as well as communicating multiple messages in one campaign.
Let’s take a restaurant Christmas launch for example – you may have multiple menus and occasions to present to customers, from office parties to Christmas Day, through to New Year’s Eve. While it’s ideal to focus on one message in your email, there is an opportunity to reference related offers with longer-form content.
In 2023, the key to your digital marketing strategy is a multi-strand approach – utilising each channel based on its strengths and how it can best assist your business. Email marketing remains one of the best methods of reaching your engaged audience at the right time with the right message!
Finish your brew…
Let’s get together to mull over your campaign ideas and apply our email marketing experience to your business. If you need a bit of help, then please reach out. We’d love to hear from you!