When I talk about email marketing with an entrepreneur the most frequent reaction is...
" But who reads emails anymore? I certainly don't, there are too many! "
This is the consolidated prejudice against a web marketing tool that is often underestimated or misjudged without having valid reasons.
To better understand its significance, an interesting first fact is to know when emails were born : the first one was in 1971, even before "SMS" was "invented" (the first SMS dates back to December 3, 1992).
Yet emails are still a cornerstone of online communication today, with 940 million messages exchanged every day in Italy.
Ultimately, the tool is used very much, and it also has a higher return on investment (ROI) than other digital channels ( source ):
So as spoiled by the title to the question
"Does Email Marketing Still Work? The Answer Is Yes, It Still Works, But Under Some Conditions"
There is email and email
First of all, we must distinguish between different types of emails : entrepreneurs often confuse email marketing with receiving unsolicited spam emails... but that is not email marketing.
It's simply SPAM, and fits into the broader spectrum of failed Jehovah's Witness sales techniques .
Failure guaranteed!
On the contrary, there are several email usage strategies that help sales because they help the reader have the information they need depending on their stage in the purchasing process.
Here is a summary of possible strategies.
The newsletters
The good old company newsletter is NOT the tool to bore your customers with just commercial or sales content.
As always, the content you share depends on the complexity of the purchasing process in your industry .
If it is a long-path purchasing process, where the customer needs to understand the possible "solutions" to his problems, and has to learn a lot before being ready to buy, then informative newsletters are recommended.
On the contrary, for established e-commerce sites (or even offline activities with a simple purchasing process) more commercial newsletters are recommended, preferably segmented according to the recipients' interests (i.e. people mainly receive information and promotions based on the products that interest them, and not on the entire available range).
The very topic of segmentation by interests is often the source of fear for entrepreneurs, who think they are losing opportunities because " Maybe someone sees new products, and then buys them "... true!
But this part of online sales must be planned , and through the proposition of related products or services , and certainly not through a boring list of things that are of no interest to your readers and customers.
Using the newsletter allows you to keep in touch with your "community" over time, even far from the moment of purchase, or in preparation for it.
But when the time to purchase approaches, you need to use another type of email, the informative ones I'll talk about below.
Informative emails
Informational emails are emails that inform, that is, lead to the education of, the recipients.
These are contents that once again can be more or less commercial, but which are received only by those who have shown interest (even if slight) in your products.
Unlike newsletters, informative emails are not received by people who have signed up " simply " to stay in touch with your company, but are usually sent in these cases:
To people who have downloaded a material , a demo , or a content and who have knowingly left their email. Once again: if they have downloaded a training content, the information they expect is a progressive in-depth study on the same topic, and only after this phase are they ready to buy a decoy product (generally not the main product/service you sell)
To people who have requested a quote : these people are very often left to their own devices, because it is believed that they are "bothering" them. This decision-making phase is important and in this particular situation it is advisable to send content that increases trust (for example reviews, case studies, product tests, etc.), and then prompt a decision by leveraging a defined deadline (offer valid until, etc.)
To people who have shown interest in something, but have not purchased : here we begin to enter the field of email marketing automation, that is, the creation of different scenarios depending on the behavior of your subscribers. A classic example? You send a newsletter to disseminate a blog post on a specific topic (e.g. email marketing) and to those who have opened this email you send a subsequent one to invite them to an in-depth event.
Automated emails, sent at the right time
This is my favorite category: emails triggered by specific sales behaviors. This is the realm of email marketing automation .
Example: I leave a product in an e-commerce cart without purchasing it, and after 1 hour I receive an email reminding me to complete the purchase.
I'll tell you right away, among the various activities, this is the one that requires the most technical skills (in the strict sense) because you have to connect the email sending system to your website.
The good news is that, for example, Mailchimp is already set up to "connect" to various CMS (i.e. site content managers) such as Wordpress or Prestashop ( here you can find more details ).
We usually use Send In Blue + Wix or Worpress, and in the case of Wix you can connect everything without the need for a programmer.
Really cool, in short.
Because the power of these emails is that they arrive at the right time, giving that extra push that the customer who was undecided about the purchase was missing.
Importance of contact list
Of course, the three categories of emails mentioned above only work well if your contact list is fresh , and if they have consciously signed up to receive your messages.
A good list can have email open rates of up to 50% (see our newsletter data below), while a poor list can have open rates of less than 10%.
Obviously, you should absolutely avoid purchased or rented lists , not only for privacy reasons (often obscure), but above all because they are people who do not know your brand and will therefore never trust them enough to buy.
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