Is email marketing still relevant?
After all, there are so many ways to reach clients in 2024. You have social media, text messages, instant messages, and chatbots.
What does email marketing bring to the table that the other channels don’t already cover?
Email marketing offers several options, one of the biggest being a platform for long-form, personalized content. So, how can you best leverage that long-form content channel to reach, convert, and retain customers?
Learn why email marketing is important and how to run your email campaigns into 2024.
Why Email Marketing Is Important in 2024
Why is email marketing important and does it work?
Here are four reasons, backed by data, that show email marketing is still alive and thriving in 2024.
Ability to Directly Communicate with Your Audience
There are over four billion people who use email daily. When you reach your audience through email, you can contact them directly through a platform they are actively engaging with.
Other marketing channels, like SEO and social media, are at the mercy of an algorithm. While there are ways to increase the odds of your marketing content appearing in front of your audience, ultimately, you can’t guarantee it.
However, in email marketing, you not only know who sees your content, but you can also track who opens that content and interacts with the content.
Chance to Earn a High Return on Investment (ROI)
The average email marketing ROI is $36 for every $1 spent, one of the highest content marketing ROIs.
Image from Omnisend
There is no need to track likes and shares or perform complex formulas. Email marketing provides the highest ROIs and is one of the most straightforward channels to track. Some key performance indicators (KPIs) to track include:
- Open rates
- Click-through rates
- Conversion rates
Opportunity to Tap into a Personalization Powerhouse
Gone are the days of generic email blasts. Personalizing your messages is the top way email marketers increase engagement. According to 99% of marketers, personalization builds customer relationships, and 90% of customers agree that personalized marketing content is appealing.
Email marketing allows you to segment your audience based on demographics, interests, and past behavior. This enables you to tailor your messages to individual needs and preferences, boosting engagement and conversion.
No other platform allows you to perform this level of hyper-personalization.
Ideal Channel to Build Trust and Credibility
About 80% of businesses say email marketing increases customer retention. In addition, 59% of customers say email impacts their purchase decisions, with the average shopper spending 138% more after seeing an email offer.
While many channels, like SEO, work well to attract those initial leads to your business, you can’t beat email marketing for nurturing those leads and encouraging loyalty and conversion.
6 Ways to Use Email Marketing Effectively
How can email marketing fuel your overall inbound strategy? Learn six ways to use email marketing to successfully build on your marketing growth goals.
1. Lead Generation and Qualification
Lead generation is not as easy as capturing leads’ email addresses.
For instance, a cybersecurity company may publish an eBook to connect with cybersecurity clients. However, not everyone downloading the eBook is a client. Some may be IT researchers, other marketers doing content research, or even college students finding statistics for a paper.
Which ones are actual, viable leads?
Email marketing takes that list you create and can filter out the irrelevant leads so you can put the most relevant leads into a lead nurturing campaign. You can measure each new contact’s response to your emails through email marketing, helping you identify their intent.
Hushly’s advanced platforms take this step further by filtering leads out at the lead capture stage by analyzing items like email addresses and website activity to help determine which contacts are most likely a lead.
2. Welcoming Emails
Once you connect with a new lead, automate a welcome email to begin the conversation immediately. Welcome emails are a series of automated emails to new subscribers to introduce them to your brand, products, and services.
Those crucial welcome emails also set expectations. They help subscribers understand what to expect going forward and encourage them to connect through other channels like social media.
Hushly’s automated platform lets you immediately set up your welcome sequence to build relationships with new leads.
3. New Lead Nurturing
Not all leads are ready to purchase immediately. Some need time to understand their needs and your products. Lead nurturing emails break down complex ideas into digestible lessons and actionable tips. They also offer less daunting call-to-actions than asking the lead to purchase.
For instance, your conversion goal might be to convince the new lead to join a webinar.
Educating and nurturing your leads through newsletters, shared content, and email updates helps generate demand. Automated lead nurturing sequences also help you further qualify leads by seeing what emails they respond best to. It helps you to identify what the lead is most interested in so you can begin segmenting those leads further and move toward hyper-personalized campaigns.
4. Personalized Email Campaigns
Nurturing the new leads moves leads from strangers to customers. It’s like a relationship where couples take time to date. Very few couples jump from exchanging phone numbers directly to walking down the aisle. There’s a period of getting to know each other, building trust, and asking crucial questions to gauge your compatibility.
B2B email marketing relies on this trust-building stage and requires a hyper-personalized approach.
Lead nurturing operates much the same way. Your customers want to know you and see whether your products and services match their needs. Your goal is to show that you do. Through email marketing, you can segment your audience by those needs to improve your personalized approach, discussing your benefits to specific audiences rather than offering general solutions.
Hushly’s powerful conversion cloud helps you segment leads into those groups and automate your personalized lead nurturing campaign.
5. Retargeting Campaigns
Not all relationships work out. But sometimes that can be due to misunderstandings. If you go after every lead that begins to walk away, you could add thousands in sales to your company.
But how do you run after those leads?
Retargeting campaigns identify leads losing interest and recapture leads right as they drift.
Here are a few ways that might look:
- Retargeting website popups recapture a lead’s interest when they’re about to leave your website.
- Cart reminders for leads who left products in their shopping carts remind them of your products.
- Automated email sequences aim to bring back the lead’s attention and keep you in their minds.
- Exclusive offers give leads more incentive to try out your products.
6. Client Retention Campaigns
With all the focus on new leads, you should also remember those loyal customers. Retaining customers takes less time and is more cost-efficient than gaining a new customer. If you are a subscription-based company, customer loyalty has an even more significant impact on your bottom line.
Here are a few ways to encourage long-term customer loyalty through email marketing:
- Send personalized emails to existing customers to thank them for their loyalty.
- Provide exclusive offers, discounts, or loyalty rewards to encourage repeat purchases.
- Share valuable content such as tips, guides, or case studies related to their previous purchases to keep them engaged.
Give Your Email Marketing a Refresh
It’s time to modernize your email marketing using AI, automation, and hyper-personalization. When you do, you’ll enjoy the power of a modern email marketing campaign that effectively targets your ideal clients, leading to a more efficient conversion path.
Hushly can help you see greater returns from your email campaigns using our all-in-one conversion cloud. It has all you need to generate, nurture, and convert leads.
Request a demo to see the power of Hushly in action.
