For many clients, email isn’t the first thing they think of when looking at building a customer base. It is seen as ‘old fashioned’ or not as relevant as social media or SEO.
However, email is still a really valuable way of keeping your customers close and building new relationships. It is a fundamental addition to your content marketing strategy and targets your audience directly as one of the most effective ways of communication. There are three times more email accounts than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined - ultimately anybody who is online has an email address and you can use this to connect with prospective customers. Over the last ten years email has generated the highest ROI over everything else that has tried to take it's place. Email has the advantage of having a personalised function and so you can speak to your audience as individuals, and tailor the content directly to their unique needs.
Let’s have a look at some stats…
- There are over 4.1 billion email accounts. This figure is predicted to reach 5.2 billion by 2018 which is a growth of more than 26%
- There are 2.5 billion email users worldwide, including both business and consumer users
- 72% of US online adults send or receive personal emails via smartphone at least weekly
- 122,500,453,020 emails are sent every hour
And it is clear that people prefer email for commercial communications;
- 72% of consumers say that email is their favoured way of communicating with companies they do business with. 61% say they like to receive promotional emails weekly and 28% want them even more frequently
- 68% of consumers find email to be their #1 preferred channel for receiving commercial messages
- 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a direct result of an email marketing message
- One in five (19%) of consumers said they read every email newsletter they receive just to see if something’s on offer
It is also important to bear in mind the importance of mobile when talking about e-marketing. Mobile is important in all aspects of our digital use, but none more so than within our e-news.
- By the year 2017 1.779 Million people will access email via their mobile device
- Mobile email will account for 15 to 70% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product and email type
- 30% of consumers now read their email exclusively on mobile devices
We’ve found a great infographic that illustrates all the components of a successful email marketing campaign, and will be exploring some of those elements in our upcoming blogs.
So how do you start?
Well, the easiest and best way to approach email marketing is by signing up for a Mailchimp account. Mailchimp is a web-based application that works in most web browsers so there is no need to download or install any new software.
If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers you can send up to 12,000 emails per month for free. Mailchimp has a variety of different templates you can use for your newsletter – either pick a pre-designed template or create one yourself if you have some designer flair! However, for the larger businesses there are also two further accounts that require monthly payments depending on your subscriber amount. Growing Business, Pro Marketer and High Volume Sender have different payment plans and add ons. To find out more, visit http://mailchimp.com/pricing/
Because it is fundamentally important to have an optimised and responsive email, Mailchimp already have this set up so your newsletter can look great on a mobile too.
Next time we will look further in depth at how to get signed up and started with Mailchimp!
All three parts of the E-marketing guide are available here and as a complete downloadable PDF document.
Further information: http://bit.ly/1IXndal