Absolutely not. Although social media has become a major player in the digital marketing landscape, people still check their emails to find deals from the brands they are interested in. In fact, 44% of users check their emails for brand promotions, whereas only four percent go to social media platforms for brand promotions.(OptinMonster)

Email marketing has been around longer than social media and is often more effective than social media. The average email open rate is between 15-25%, with an average click-through rate of roughly 2.5%. (Campaign Monitor) On the contrary, with Facebook, you can expect a click-through rate of only 0.07% and Twitter 0.03%. (Despreneur Magazine)

As far as ROI, email marketing tends to have a significantly higher return than other channels. As we noted previously, it’s estimated that email generates $42 for every $1 spent—a 4200% ROI. Social media comes in at a distant second place with an estimated average ROI of 28% (eMarketer). According to a report by Monetate, email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel.

Integrating email marketing with social media can strengthen your results, however. Email shines in customer retention and transactions, while social media excels in branding, building awareness, and creating an active follower community. It is a good idea to include social icons and social share icons in your emails to allow your audience to visit your social sites and share your message.

51% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email (Statista)

Email is a great way to encourage existing customers to get engaged with your brand and allows you to show new customers precisely who your brand is and why they should do business with you. Strong client relationships require regular brand communications – and regular email interactions with customers generate brand loyalty while driving sales.

Email marketing allows you to create personalized messages for your customers. Personalization helps customers feel appreciated as part of your brand community, helping them form strong emotional connections with your brand they may not get anywhere else. The best way to create personalized messaging is through segmentation.

Take, for instance, Rewards Programs. Segmenting your customers into how many reward points they have is one of the best ways to boost loyalty and retention. Emails built around a rewards program maintain a positive relationship with the customer and give them an opportunity for redemption. You can keep your customers engaged in your rewards program through email by showing how close they are to a reward and encouraging them to reach the next level. Including value-added content and special” rewards club” offers via personalized email helps build emotional engagement and loyalty further.

Email campaigns are a great way to reach your audience and engage with them. One of the best types of emails Is the email newsletter. Creating an engaging email newsletter can help you build up trust, which will lead people to explore more about your products and services. There are so many possibilities for newsletter content. You can share your company story. Give a behind-the-scenes tour. Talk about your community involvement. Include positive customer reviews. Feature your employees. Interview a thought leader or answer frequently asked questions. And best of all, through personalization, you can present information on the products and services that the customer has shown interest in from previous interactions.

Call to Actions (CTAs) are also critical to customer engagement. The CTAs in your emails are the entrance to your sales funnel. If your CTA copy doesn’t hold the visitor’s attention, it can hurt your click-through rate, conversions, and in the end, sales. Your CTAs should be prominent and include copy that motivates a click. Examples include but are certainly not limited to  “Try it Free,” “Buy it Now,” “Read the White Paper,” and “Get Started.”

82% of marketers spend between 0% and 20% of their budgets on email. (DMA)

Email marketing campaigns range from simple to highly complex. A small business can run small campaigns using basic technology while large companies use marketing automation platforms and CRM tools to deliver large-scale campaigns. Email marketing is less labor-intensive than traditional marketing. There is no postage, printing, or labeling required for each campaign distributed. Targeted email marketing allows you to communicate with your audience (whether it’s a few hundred or 100,000) in a matter of minutes. Email marketing is also scalable. As your customer list grows, so can your email campaigns.

Email marketing spend falls into three categories: data, creative, and technology.

Data:

Making sure your customer data is clean and accurate is critical. There are companies that offer list hygiene services to ensure your addresses are deliverable, email append services that will add email addresses to your postal files, and data enrichment services that can add demographic or firmographic information to your contact information. These costs are well worth it to make sure your files are as robust as they can be.

It’s also essential to grow your customer email list. For example, you can add a call to action to your blog articles to encourage readers to sign up for your newsletter. You can create gated content like white papers, which people can download in exchange for their email address, or you can create a webinar where people must register with their email address to watch the webinar.

You may also want to consider renting an email list. We say renting because you shouldn’t buy an email list – you need permission to send someone a marketing email- instead, you pay for access to lists built by other businesses, like catalogers, memberships organizations, and publishing companies. The list provider, or its list broker, will help you choose your audience, send your customized message for you, and send you tracking reports on open rates and click-throughs. Avoid places that will sell you mailing lists very cheaply, as these often include outdated addresses. Generally, consumer lists cost between $80 to $150 per thousand emails, and business lists cost about $300 per thousand. Most require a minimum run of 5,000 names, so you are looking at a base price of $1,500 for business emails. Further targeting your list by selects such as job function or title can add between $5 and $25 per thousand, and some places will charge transmission fees. Seek out a reputable list marketing firm for assistance.

Creative:

Killer creative is essential in email marketing. It’s important that your visual presentation is pleasing and that your copy is captivating. It’s also important to have a powerful subject line that gets your email opened. A lousy subject line can cause your email never to be opened and sent to junk. If you don’t have the creative bandwidth in-house, it’s an excellent investment to have an agency produce your creative for you. Agencies can create copy that encourages recipients to click into the email and then click through to your website.

Technology:

Technology has a hand in everything these days. Digital tools account for a large portion of email marketing expenses. Under the CAN-SPAM Act, marketers are required to provide an easy way for recipients to opt-out of future emails. Automation tools like Hubspot or Marketo provide you with software that transmits your marketing messages and makes opting out easy. Automation also allows for triggered emails, which are automated emails sent to recipients who take an action like request more information, or abandon a shopping cart, or even place an order. You can also invest in CRM software like Salesforce. CRM is a tool that records and manages every time your company interacts with a customer or prospect. Your sales team can see a relationship’s history and schedule follow-up. MA and CRM are often integrated to give you the best picture of your customer’s journey.

MA platforms are typically billed as a monthly or annual plan. They are based on how many emails you transmit and what tools you need like dynamic personalization or social media. Pricing can range from about $50 per month to over $3,000 per month with onboarding fees. Paid CRM system costs start from around $12 per user per month for small businesses. More advanced packages for larger enterprises range from $50 to $150 per user per month, while the most expensive CRM systems charge $300 per user per month or more. (Expert Market) Marketing automation consultants and CRM consultants will manage your platforms for a fee if you don’t have the resources or knowledge to do so in-house.

While traditional marketing focuses on delivering a broad message to a large audience scope, today’s automation tools allow you to offer unique, personalized email messages based on criteria such as birthdays, purchases, and location. Emails with personalized subject lines get higher transaction rates – six times higher, according to Experian – and according to Campaign Monitor, they’re 26% more likely to be opened than emails with no personalization. Just adding a name isn’t enough though – hyper-personalization ensures that emails only supply customers with content that is directly relevant to them – or even feels like it was created specifically for them. Segmentation is the key to having personalization. The more segments you create, the more personalized your content will become. Divide your list by purchase history, browsing behavior, location, and more. Then, it’s as simple as creating unique content that is relevant to each group.

The only way to know what works best for your business is to test, test, test, review the results, and then make the necessary adjustments. This is an ongoing process. Even when campaigns are successful, they can always be better. Email marketing is perfect for testing. You can perform A/B and multivariate testing to examine various components of your campaign, from the subject line, to day/time sent, to the graphics or content within the email.

Email is totally trackable. You can use Google Analytics to track email campaigns. You can also use analytics provided by your email marketing software that will give you valuable insight into the performance of your deployed campaigns. The most often reported engagement metrics are open rates, click rates and click-through rates (CTRs), bounces and conversions. Using these insights, you can develop new strategies to better your results in future campaigns

Email continues to be the main driver of customer retention and acquisition for small and midsize businesses. 81% of SMBs rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention. (Emarsys)

As a small business, you have a small budget for marketing. It’s a challenge to make your marketing dollars go far. Every penny allocated to your marketing efforts must deliver an ROI or you risk losing your money and the opportunity to close more sales. You know you need to acquire new customers and retain your existing clients, but you can’t afford to invest time or resources into something that isn’t going to deliver the results you expect. One of the best ways to spend your marketing dollars is email marketing because it’s a cost effective way to reach your customers on a more frequent basis with personalized messages that encourage engagement and drive sales. On average for every $1 you spend on email marketing your return is $42. (DMA) And a McKinsey study found that email is almost 40 times more effective than Twitter and Facebook combined in attracting new customers.

With email marketing small businesses can:

• Connect with more customers more frequently
• Build credibility and brand recognition
• Send personalized, targeted messaging
• Communicate relevant information to your customers
• Increase traffic to your website
• Announce sales, special dates and events, and special offers
• And so much more!

If you want to maintain a clean email list, you should regularly perform email hygiene to your list. It entails removing invalid and uninterested email addresses from your list and sending out only relevant messages to your audience.

As an emailer, you need to maintain a good sender reputation. A lot of unsubscribes and spam reports will make the ESPs feel that you are not a credible service provider. This will increase the possibility of your emails not getting delivered.

Ultimately, if you don’t maintain the quality of your content, even your top subscribers will stop responding, which will make the ESPs think even more negatively of you.

It is recommended to perform list hygiene every six months for most email programs. But if you notice a bounce rate of 3-5% or more, it’s time to list hygiene so that you don’t set off a spam alert.

Reach Marketing offers email hygiene services. Reach will analyze and process an email list identifying the following categories:

Failed Email Structure Validation/Key Failure

Records that have been identified as containing keywords that are flagged as being indicative of a trap or screamer. This also includes records that are not structured like an email address.

Disposable Email Address

Domains that are solely used by people to sign up for something then never used again. These records should not be deployed to.

Known Hard Bounces/Pinged Hard Bounces

These records have previously been deployed by Reach Marketing or have been “pinged” and have received a hard bounce classification. These records should not be deployed.

Spam Trap/Mole Record

This includes identified known mole/trap records and domains, as well as suspected/higher risk records. This process also includes suppression of records within domains known to feed data upstream to 3rd party SPAM monitoring services. We strongly recommend suppressing all records within this category. The risk is not worth any reward in deploying them.

When you want to stay in touch with your audience in a personalized way, drip marketing is a great way to do it. You may have heard it called automated email campaigns, lifecycle emails, triggered emails, or autoresponders. Let’s say you want to make sure you recognize your customers’ birthdays. You could set up a drip campaign to email a special birthday offer a week before and then email a birthday greeting the day of your customer’s birthday. Drip marketing is sending a limited number of emails to your audience automatically, on a set timing, based on actions they take, special dates, or changes in their status. The goal of drip marketing is to move customers through the sales funnel.

What do we mean by actions? Some examples of actions that can trigger drip marketing include:

• Placing an order
• Not placing an order for a while
• Abandoning a shopping cart
• Attending an event at your store, company, or facility
• Registering for a webinar
• Downloading a white paper
• Engaging with customer service

Why use drip marketing? According to research, people who read your drip emails are far more likely to click the links in them, with a 119% increase in click rate from drip emails. Drip marketing can help you boost sales by increasing repeat purchases, re-engaging dormant customers, and converting visitors into customers. By communicating relevant information to your audience, trust will slowly begin to grow, and those customers will be one step closer to making a purchase.

Marketing automation makes the process of sending out drip campaigns easy. Each time a drip email is sent out, it comes from a queue of already-written emails—there’s no need to manually write and send each email. Use drip campaigns for every stage of the funnel. From the top of the funnel – welcome drips to the middle of the funnel- lead nurturing campaigns and new product recommendations, to the bottom of the funnel – order and shipping confirmations.

As a trusted email marketing company in the industry with marketing automation expertise, Reach Marketing has set up hundreds of drip marketing campaigns for our clients. Contact us today to speak to an automation consultant at 855.867.3224.

Many marketers discover that managing email marketing campaigns can be very complicated, particularly when it comes to complying with strict deliverability standards and regulations. It may be time to call in the experts to help you deliver your powerful messaging straight to the inbox while maximizing the potential of this critical marketing channel.

When you hire a full-service email marketing agency, the experienced and highly qualified team can help you get more subscribers, increase deliverability, improve engagement, and integrate cross-channel marketing efforts to maximize your reach and return.

It’s a worthwhile investment to have a knowledgeable, professional team in your corner that can help turn the complicated chore of customer emailing into a simple, reliable, effective means of helping you attract new business and increase your company’s bottom line, all while ensuring your company is following strict deliverability and email-optimization best practices.

Reach Marketing’s full-service email program includes:

On-going:

• Monitor IP reputation score
• Assess sending domains
• Review distribution list for spam traps, moles, and screamers
• Maintain clean distribution lines with ISPs

Pre-Deployment:

• Setup email campaign
• Create text backup message
• Assess email layout
• Analyze email copy

Post-Deployment:

• Produce live email results reporting
• Review specific campaign results
• Provide benchmark results
• Analyze campaign for future recommendations

A dedicated IP address gives you complete control over your Email Sender Score, a mark of email service providers’ trust in your brand. With dedicated infrastructure, your email bears your organization’s name, instilling greater trust in your message resulting in improved deliverability and higher inbox penetration rates.

If you choose Reach Marketing to transmit your email campaigns, our email marketing experts will set up a dedicated IP address to ensure that you are maintaining the highest reputation possible.

Sender Score Tracking

The higher your sender score, the greater your deliverability rates will be. Your Reach Marketing email marketing consultant monitors performance and tracks your sender score to ensure your messages make it into your recipient’s inbox.

1. Email Newsletters

Email Newsletters are sent to engage your prospects and customers and provide them with the latest news, tips, or updates about your product, service, or company. They can be sent out daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly. You should make sure your email newsletter is filled with relevant and useful information to your subscribers, providing value and personalized content.

You can use email newsletters to drive traffic to your website by making sure you link to relevant content on your site from the newsletter. You should also include links to your social media profiles on your email newsletters to drive traffic to your Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, etc.

Email newsletters require an opt-out link so that recipients may unsubscribe.

2. Promotional Emails

Promotional emails are sent to inform your audience of your products or services. They include new product offers, special deals, limited-time offers, or exclusive content. The goal of a promotional email is to create new customers or encourage existing customers to perform an action. These actions may be purchases, downloads, scheduling a call, registering for an event, etc. You should always make sure your promotional emails include a strong call to action.

Sending too many promotional emails may annoy your target audience, so maybe start a few times a month and then move up to weekly and then if you have enough relevant content 2 to 3 times a week.

Promotional emails require an opt-out link so that recipients may unsubscribe.

3. Transactional Emails

Transactional or “triggered emails are automated emails usually sent by a business to facilitate a transaction or provide a product or service, as requested by a prospect or customer.

Transactional emails include welcome and onboarding messages, cart abandonment messages, order confirmation, shipping, and return/exchange notification, delivery information, and order update information. Because customers want these emails, it’s an opportunity for you to attach further calls to action and branding. But be careful not to turn your transactional email into a promotional email.

Transactional emails do not require an opt-out link.

4. Nurture Emails

Nurture emails are a series of emails sent based on a lead’s behavior, which delivers timely, targeted information that helps guide them through the customer journey.

For your business to secure a loyal audience, you need to establish a relationship and build trust. With nurture campaigns, marketers use user behavior analytics to provide potential customers with content that answers their questions and gets them to purchase. Personalized emails are essential for nurture emails to be successful.

1. Welcome Series

When a prospect or new customer submits information to your business, they want to hear from you. A welcome email is the first impression your company gets to make with a potential customer. Welcome emails can deliver videos, special offers, a sign-up form, or just a “welcome” to establish a relationship with your new contact.

2. Winback Series

A winback email is a message you send to inactive subscribers—someone who previously engaged with your company through a purchase or engagement with an email campaign or your website but, for some reason or another, stopped doing so for a period of time.

Research shows a loyal customer is the most profitable and a referred customer provides the best return on marketing. Certainly, lost customers have more value than cold prospects. Try and find out why the customer hasn’t engaged in a while. You can send a triggered email saying something like “We Miss You” and offer a special discount for them to come back.

3. Campaigns Based on Web Activity

These are emails sent based on products or services viewed, actions taken, or specific clicks on web pages. For instance, if someone downloads an industry report from your website, you can set up a triggered email to respond a few days later, asking if you can answer any questions about the topic covered in the whitepaper or be of further assistance. Or is someone views a particular product; you can set up a triggered email to offer a special on that product or give recommendations for other products similar to that product.

When you need a hand with your marketing automation platform, our dedicated team of campaign coordinators will be ready to assist you. We offer full-service email campaign setup, custom HTML templates, optimization, testing, and deployment of email campaigns. We help set up campaigns all the way up to a full embed into your team to handle all campaigns.

Our structured approach allows us to schedule campaigns for deployment within any time zone. For live support, our regular business hours are 8 am to 6 pm EST. In addition, we can allocate dedicated account personnel to handle any scheduled procedures and special requests from 6 to 9 pm EST, Monday through Friday, as needed.

For our clients with a global presence, Reach Marketing traffics creative supplied in multiple languages with staggered/scheduled deployments depending on local time zones and managing/ensuring compliance with country-specific rules and regulations for email marketing such as CAN-SPAM, CASL, and GDPR.

Our team at Reach Marketing is a rare selection of versatile, established data-driven marketing professionals who care about your business’s success. Contact us today to speak to an automation consultant at 855.867.3224.

Integrated marketing rejects the silo mentality. An integrated approach ensures that all channels are aligned and follow the same business strategy and goals. By integrating your channels, your messages provide clarity, consistency, and maximum impact with your audience.

With integrated marketing campaigns:

• You can reach a wider audience than a single marketing channel.
• You have a greater chance of being seen on multiple channels.
• You build trust with your audience as they see a consistent message on multiple channels.
• It saves you money since assets can be shared between channels and repurposed.

Along with email marketing services, Reach Marketing offers SEO services, full-service PPC Management, Social Advertising, Database Marketing, B2B Lead Generation, and Marketing Automation. Contact us to discuss how an integrated marketing strategy can lead to more conversions and increase your ROI.