With the emergence of social media and many other forms of marketing, many people and businesses thought that email marketing was a gone case. However, this is not even near the reality. Email marketing still holds that mantle when it comes to reaching customers and increasing eCommerce sales.
Therefore, if you want to start a business, then you must seriously consider adding email marketing, as part of your business plan. The success of any eCommerce business will significantly depend on your business plan, which will also include your marketing strategies.
But, before we look at the primary reasons why email marketing is still an ace in marketing, let first understand some of these terms.
What is Email Marketing?
Email marketing typically refers to the promotion of a brand, product or business, through emails. This method aims at nurturing relationships with prospective customers, as well as keeping the current ones informed.
It helps a business to easily communicate with the customers about any upcoming activities such as coupon offers, customer loyalty, and many others. Email marketing is a direct marketing method, similar to snail mail, although it is more efficient both for your wallet and the environment as it’s purely paperless.
Therefore, if you ever thought that the email market had outlived its usefulness, you can’t be more wrong than that. Email marketing is still beneficial.
What is a Business plan?
The term business plan refers to a written depiction of the future of your business. It shows all the ideas you have for your business as well as how you intend to accomplish your goals. This is important as it helps to keep you on track, based on your goals and objectives.
Therefore when formulating a business plan, make sure that you include everything necessary for the success of your business. The good thing about this is that nowadays you can access some great business plan templates that can help you in creating an incredible business plan.
These plans are fundamentally strategic, and they help to show you where to start, the path to follow, as well as where you want to reach. So, what are these benefits that make email marketing an incredible marketing tool for your online business?
1. Helps to Cultivate Strong Customer Relationships
Your customers are your business. This means that customers determine whether your business will succeed or not. Email marketing gives businesses an avenue to create and maintain favorable customer relationships. In other words, it helps you to create and retain loyal customers.
Customers always want to feel appreciated and acknowledged. They want to know that the company they are loyal to thinks about them. Email marketing helps you to do just this by sending them notifications of the latest activities and trends in the business.
Therefore, when formulating a business plan for your online business, make sure that email marketing is part of that plan. It is one of the easiest and effective ways of reaching your customers.
2. It is an Incredibly Effective Marketing Tool
If you want your message to reach your potential and existing customers easily, then email marketing is the right tool for that. However, you should ensure that your cold email outreach template is well thought through. You don’t want to keep sending emails to potential customers, which will never be read.
To overcome this, you have to personalize the emails you send and make them attractive. This will help ensure that the recipient wants to know more about your brand. Just remember that since you are contacting someone with whom you don’t have any prior relationship, the email must be convincing.
Nonetheless, statistics show that at least 79% of the people you send emails to receive these messages. Some other studies also show that this percentage can rise even up to around 90%.
Better still, around 4.24% of the people who visit your online store from email marketing tend to make some purchases. This is almost double the percentage of visitors who will do purchase searches. Again, this conversion rate is way much higher than that of the social media platforms, which stands at around 0.59%.
3. Email marketing is Cost-Effective
As compared to other methods, and considering its rate of conversion and effectiveness, an email marketing strategy can be relatively cheap. For every email you send to your email list, you pay around a penny or even less.
Of all the marketing solutions around, email marketing seems like the one with the highest ROI. This comes to approximately $44 for each $1 spend.
4. Email Marketing Is Incredibly Measurable
One significant advantage of using email as a marketing tool is that you can measure its effectiveness. Various statistics, such as open rate, conversion rate, and click-through rate, help to measure the effectiveness of the emails you send.
On the other hand, other stats like spam complaints, bounce rate, as well as unsubscribe rate, shows you how good is your email list. This means that you can track everything, enabling you to identify where there is room for improvement. It helps you to know your next step of action.
5. Excellent ROI
When it comes to marketing channels, emails still hold as the best channel in terms of ROIs (return on investments). Based on a report by the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing results to around 3800% ROI. This means that it is a handy form of marketing. But how do these high numbers come about?
Well, the most straightforward reason for this figure is because, when using email marketing, you decide which segment you want to target based on your email list. This means that you can send customized emails to a particular target group.
Another reason is that there are numerous ways of using emails to reach your audiences, such as newsletters, drip emails, festive discounts, and abandoned cart reminders. All these make email marketing a great marketing tool for your eCommerce business.