Understanding the Power of Email Marketing for Businesses

According to VentureBeat on email marketing – email is the channel generating the highest ROI for marketers.

Given this report, it is no wonder many people say that ‘the money is in the list’, but that can be misleading, and I would tell you why if you read on.

To start with, what is email marketing and particularly, what its role in any business today?

Email marketing is an aspect of digital marketing that assists in moving a customer from one stage of the customer journey to the next.

For clarification, maybe you are wondering what a customer journey is, well, it is the process of making a complete stranger become aware of your brand, engage with you, subscribe to your contents, become a customer, get excited for the services rendered or products bought. Become a repeat customer; say nice things about you to others and to ultimately become an active promoter.

That is simply what a customer journey is, the transition of a total stranger to a satisfied customer and an active promoter of your brand.

The importance of email marketing cannot be overstated in business today with its much possible use, ranging from branding, customer acquisition, customer retention, reactivation, engagement, traffic conversion, direct sales, referral and much more.

In fact, the question is not whether one should use email marketing to improve his or her business; the question is why are you not using email marketing already?

In the United States, it is reported by the Direct Marketing Association that email marketing yields an average 4,300% return on investment for businesses. That is not to say that it is impossible for businesses in other countries, in fact, the outputs are the same all around.

Many business owners and marketers are confused as to where to focus their email marketing efforts, forgetting that email marketing is simply marketing at its best. If you are one of those, the solution is to approach it by starting with what has been working for you already. Email marketing is just marketing using email technology.

In order to do this right though, there are three types of email marketing that you need to move a customer through each stage of the lifecycle. They are transactional, relational and promotional.

Transactional:

Transactional emails are messages you send to customers as a response to certain actions they have taken. Examples of such are order confirmations, purchase receipts, account creation, shipping notifications, password confirmations and so on. In fact, the Experian Email Benchmark Report says that the ‘average revenue per transactional email is 2x-5x more than the standard bulk email’

Relational:

Relational emails are messages broadcast or triggered to customers for the purpose of engagement. The messages include new subscriber emails, lead magnet delivery, newsletter or blog articles, social updates, contest announcement, webinar confirmation and so on.

Promotional:

Promotional emails are messages sent with the purpose of selling. This could range from new lead magnets, sale announcements, trial offers, and promotional content upgrade offers and much more.

Note, however, that sometimes some of these promotional emails are relational in nature. That’s absolutely okay. The important thing is to know what purpose the email is created for and how it should be sent.

Now, having known the three types of emails, the question is how do you send these types of email and to who should you send them to?

There are two send types of email, namely Broadcast and Triggered emails.

For the most part, your emails will be triggered by certain actions taken by your customers. However, there are only two types of broadcast emails that you should send to your entire database. These are promotions and newsletters. Everything else should be triggered by a specific action or behavior of your customers at different stages of the journey with you.

Got any question or comment? Go ahead to the comment box now, I’ll be here…