With new marketing trends popping up almost every year, one of the questions we commonly hear is, “Is email marketing still important?”. Outside looking in, email may seem to be the dinosaur in the digital marketing landscape, but letting go of this marketing strategy may be a big mistake.
Since the early 2000s, email marketing has been the most cost-effective strategy, generating the highest ROI among all marketing methods. It has even surpassed organic search in terms of investment returns.
But email marketing has evolved over the years. What worked in the past no longer works today. How you make use of digital marketing services like email newsletters should be tailored to fit changing trends.
Why Email Newsletters Matter
There is a reason why marketing experts keep coming back to email. In simple terms: It just works! In fact, careful observation of the digital marketing landscape will reveal that contrary to what most of us believed, email marketing is a critical part of a successful marketing strategy.
Let’s break down some of the biggest reasons why you should level up your email marketing game.
Wider Organic Reach than Social Media
At a time when everybody’s on social media, you would assume that it’s the fastest, most effective channel through which to expand your reach. But it’s just not so.
Email marketing surpasses social media in generating organic reach. Mind-blowing, we know. According to Campaign Monitor, open rates on email are five times higher than the number of people who see your posts on Facebook, the biggest social platform today.
On Facebook, only 6% of users get the chance to interact with your content. On email, on the other hand, that’s up to 30%.
This doesn’t mean, though, that you should ditch your social media campaigns. Those have their own strengths too. What this tells us is email marketing shouldn’t be an afterthought in your strategies. It’s a marketing powerhouse on its own.
Better Customer Relationships
Another reason why email newsletters work is it nurtures better customer relationships.
When you have successfully generated target traffic into your site or social media, retaining your audience through effective follow-up in the form of newsletter segmentation is important. New leads, for example, can easily get lost through the cracks unless there is a solid system in place with which to make sure they continue to be captivated.
Email newsletters are amazing at this.
Through A/B testing and email automation, you can accurately gauge what your audiences respond to best, helping you create highly personalized content geared toward customer action. This matters because segmented campaigns generate a 100.95% click-through-rate compared to non-segmented ones.
Aside from this, segmented campaigns are also effective at nurturing relationships so customers don’t remain one-time clickers. Instead, they keep coming back.
Impressive ROI
Even if you only look at the bottom line, email newsletters are an effective marketing strategy that generates a whopping 4000% ROI. Taking into consideration how promotional emails and newsletters also compete with junk mail that gets immediately filtered out or deleted by users, it’s doubly impressive.
But why do email newsletters actually generate so much return on investment? A few factors:
- Most people check their emails every day. You’d think it’s just social media, but no. In reality, people check their emails several times in a day!
- Emails directly affect purchasing decisions. Studies suggest the information people receive by email directly affects what they buy. Those promotional messages, discount vouchers, and more actually work!
Best Practices for Email Newsletter Design
Nowadays, less and less people read paper copies of anything. Lifestyles are also more fast-paced, making people prefer easier access to content. This translates into higher consumption of content through mobile instead of web browsing.
To make email newsletters more appealing to target audiences, here are some best practices to keep in mind:
Optimize for Mobile
Majority of users check their emails using mobile phones. To capture this huge chunk of the market, make sure that your design is optimized for mobile and easy to read on a smaller screen.
Here are some ways to do that:
- Use alt text. Optimize your photos too, not just your text! Alt texts on photos also make your content more indexable and viewing-ready even if the photos don’t load as quickly as they should.
- Use single-column formatting. Smaller phone screens accommodate comfortably fits only one column of content. So clean up and simplify your interface.
- Use appropriately sized images. Compress your images so they don’t affect your newsletter’s load time. You don’t want to lose your audience’s attention by using bulky images that are also too large to fit a phone screen.
Use Button CTAs
Make your call to action stand out by using button CTAs to end your newsletter. Compared to in-line CTAs, they’re more eye-catching and easier to access. The white space surrounding a CTA button allows it to pop out of the page, effectively inviting people to click.
Favor High Responsiveness
Faster response times also make email newsletters more effective at retaining audience attention. No one has the time to wait for a clunky newsletter to load.
Here are some ways to increase your newsletter’s responsiveness:
- Keep it short
- Limit the number of images
- Break up large chunks of text into bite-sized nuggets
- Choose a clean design that allows the content to shine
Tips for Writing Engaging Newsletter Content
Regardless of how aesthetically appealing your newsletter is, if it doesn’t have much of value to say, it’s easy to toss it as junk.
Here are ways to write strong and engaging newsletter content:
- Write something you would be interested in. Put yourself in the shoes of your reader, and ask yourself, “What would I want to know or read about?”
- Make it personal. Few things are easier to dismiss than a spammy-sounding email. So avoid being generic, and stay true to what you know will hook your reader. Newsletter segmentation is an effective way to achieve this.
- Create eye-catching email subject lines. Your email newsletter subject or title can only use so many words. Make each word work by using power verbs, descriptive language, and relevant messaging.
- Provide an incentive for reading it through to the end. Gimmicks like voucher codes and other promotional materials that can only be accessed by reading the newsletter is an example of an effective way to do this.
Email Away!
These tips have hopefully given you valuable insight into how email marketing works and how to use it to grow your business. Still, finding the right recipe for an effective email marketing campaign can feel like one big puzzle.
The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way.
By collaborating with a trusted digital marketing agency, you can launch a solid marketing campaign that allows you to tell impactful stories, expand your reach, and get people to act.
Contact us today to know how to get started.
Jossaine Nunez is a freelance article writer, blogger, and SEO-driven maven. While her true passion lies in writing fiction, her love for storytelling extends to helping brands convey their message in ways that are both engaging and helpful for attaining their business goals.
Jossaine’s interests in writing particularly about people, for people – which translates to brand audience engagement – stems from her experience as the Editor-In-Chief of Siliman University’s The Weekly Silimanian, which published slices of life and educational pieces surrounding university life. Her piece, A Review of Leoncio Deriada’s People on Guerrero Street, published in the Silliman Journal on discussions and investigations in the humanities and sciences, earmarks her foray into the world of writing about, and writing for, humans that make the world go round.
