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Long Live Email Marketing

Long Live Email Marketing

Is your company gradually losing faith in email as a useful and effective marketing tool? Is the Finance Department asking questions about whether the time and energy to design an email campaign are worth the investment? According to recent studies, email still holds the marketing castle, whether targeting PC or mobile users:

  • 85 percent of American retailers consider email marketing as one of the most effective customer acquisition techniques, ahead of social media as well as traditional trade shows and events
  • 28 percent of online consumers report subscribing to store or product emails so that they can stay informed about the services or items that they are interested in
  • 68 percent of emails are opened on mobile devices, with a desktop computer used 32 percent of the time.

Email Marketing is Hard Work

But not every email marketing campaign is created equal. Email marketing has several primary objectives, including building client loyalty, trust, and brand awareness. But the reality is that over 50% of recipients delete an obvious marketing email within 2 seconds of opening it, while in strategically executed campaigns, over 75% of recipients read the entire message. Sending emails is no longer enough; sending emails strategically and with a deeper understanding of who your clients are in the new email marketing standard for businesses in every industry sector.

As studies repeatedly show, consumers expect marketers to generate email marketing that is relevant and personalized, tailored specifically to address their needs and preferences. Being able to reach or exceed these expectations and to engage customer data quickly, accurately, and seamlessly is shown to be essential to:

  • Increasing market efficiency and sales conversion, both digital and traditional
  • Creating streamlined and intuitive workflows
  • Increasing client retention and loyalty
  • Enhancing client satisfaction
  • Developing integrated and omnichannel branding
  • Creating and managing market personas.

But building an effective email marketing campaign is not always as easy as it sounds. One of the downfalls of doing email marketing well is that it takes time and resources. Building an effective email campaign can be cumbersome, time-consuming, and even frustrating. It requires integrating multiple systems and checkpoints, all of which come under pressure of a mission-critical deployment deadline.

From initial ideation to segmentation and deployment, more than half of in-house email marketing campaigns take two or more weeks to develop, so wasting time on an ineffective strategy is both wasteful and dangerous to your company’s brand.

How an Email Marketing Agency Can Help

Rather than looking in-house to manage all the heavy lifting that comes with building an effective email marketing campaign, you might want to consider working with an agency specializing in making the most out of every customer contact and every piece of content. Some of the benefits of working with an agency include:

Data, data, data. Email marketing is only as good as your customer data in your files or captured in your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. According to a DiscoveryOrg study, even the most basic (and fundamentally important) data degrades are likely happening far more rapidly than we think. Every year:

  • 20 percent of postal addresses change
  • 18 percent of phone numbers change
  • 25 to 33 percent of email addresses are effectively outdated
  • 60% of people change job functions.

Due to data degradation, north American sales departments typically lose approximately 550 hours and $32,000 per salesperson. Email marketing agencies have robust processes and software to provide basic to advanced levels of email maintenance so that your email marketing content is delivered where it can deliver the most impact and avoid being deleted.

An agency can also help validate your email list by ensuring that your email list conforms to a standard format and identifying spelling, syntax, and other errors, duplicate files, phone contacts, and the like. Clean data improve your deliverability rate and ensures your email never gets tagged as spam or captured on an abuse report.

Scale with ease. Once you find the perfect balance of tone and content that works for your customers, working with an agency makes it easy to lock that formula down for future campaigns or to tweak it as needed. This continuity provides a reliable way to improve our email marketing content’s consistency and let you go about your business without worrying about those inconsistent or irrelevant emails that damage your brand reputation.

Stay current. Did you know that email marketing trends for 2020 are user-generated content, responsive interactivity, accessibility, and automation? Have you considered how any or all of these might be used to bolster your next email marketing campaign’s conversion rate? A well-chose agency will take bring their expertise in all things email marketing to your campaign so that you are on the front-end of the curve rather than lagging as you pour over piles of reports, projections, and recommendations.

Create content that is relevant and gets noticed. Given that the average open rate for emails across all businesses is 20.94 percent, we already know that 8 out of 10 times your carefully constructed email marketing content into the trash bin. And yet as recently as three years ago, over 98 percent of all emails did not use even the most basic first/last name personalization in their Subject lines. An agency can help you take full advantage of personalization strategies, dynamic content (including video), and other features that can bring your email marketing content to the next level.

Ever considered adding emojis to your subject line? One study shows that recipients opened email messages that contained relevant and targeted emojis in the Subject line 66 percent more often than those without.

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A useful and familiar tool, email marketing is still a valuable part of any strategy. A well-crafted email is still a critical tool in motivating a customer to take decisive action. And the research is crystal clear: effective email marketing makes your customers feel valued, relevant, and respected.

At Summit Crew, we know that every email you send reinforces your company’s reputation and brand. Contact us today to learn how our email marketing experts can help your next campaign be the best it can be.

If you need help growing your business and averaging 400% or more ROI from your digital efforts, give us a call today or schedule a free strategy session with one of our experts in digital marketing. You will have an opportunity to discuss your business and your marketing goals, and we will provide recommendations on what you should be doing based on our BOOST Method. This is a sales-pitch-free no-obligation meeting, just real advice.

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