Does Email Marketing Still Work?

With the growth of social media marketing coupled with the tightening of data protection laws is email marketing still an effective tool for marketers?

Definitely.  Done right, email marketing does work and is an important communication channel for any digital marketing strategy.

For email marketing to be effective, there needs to be a clearly defined strategy, with great content and clear call to actions.  When properly leveraged email marketing can support the new sales process as well as help with on-boarding and retention.

Where marketers go wrong with email marketing is :

• Sending blanket untargeted emails which are not relevant to the recipients
• Sending ineffectual and poor content
• Over-reliance on email marketing i.e. sending too many emails, reduces their effectiveness and just leads to unsubscribes.

To be effective emails must be personalised for specific segments and personas based on where a recipient is in the sales process.  It must always provide something of value to the recipient.

A clearly defined email marketing strategy which sends relevant and insightful content can nurture prospects through the sales funnel to the point of purchase.  Email marketing also works incredibly well to support on-boarding new customers post purchase,  providing useful content and tips on using the product or service.  Email marketing is also important in ecommerce for example remarketing emails and abandoned carts emails to encourage purchase.

Once you get your email marketing strategy right in terms of audience, sequencing and content it can play a vital role in the success of your digital marketing strategy.  Then you can look at ways to improve the performance of the emails themselves.  Optimising subject lines, layout, deliverability, call to actions etc. to improve results.  I will explore some optimisation tips in my next blog post.

For more help and advice on email marketing or your digital marketing strategy, please contact me.