Why should you use Email Marketing?

6 min readAug 13, 2018

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If you have a business and you are not using any Email Marketing yet, then you are reading the correct article. I’m going to share with you on why you should use Email Marketing, when you should use it and how you can start using it.

Let’s understand why

Email Marketing have been around for ages and it is often neglected by business owners. Often this marketing strategy is deem as complicated and ineffective.

However, many statistics and studies have shown how effective Email Marketing is and how much it is being used in businesses around the world. I am going to highlight some important points on why you should use Email Marketing.

1. Email Marketing is Affordable

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Email Marketing is affordable, there are many Email Service Providers out there offering basic plans that you can try to see how effective Email Marketing can be.

Here are some email service providers to start with:

MailChimp
SendGrid
Campaign Monitor
OptinMonster
Hubspot

These plans are usually free and allows you to send a fixed number of emails to a fixed number of email subscribers.

You also don’t have to worry about creating an email template, Email Service Providers are usually loaded with basic email templates that you can use for free.

Yes, you saw that right, you can start email marketing at basically $0, FREE!

Note: Basic templates are good enough especially if you’re just starting out and if you’re looking to create more sophisticated emails then you can look for other alternatives like Mailworks!

2. Email is highly accessible

People of all ages are sending and receiving emails, as reported by Radicati Group, people are sending and receiving 281 billion emails in a single day in 2018. The numbers reported are crazy isn’t it?

But that’s not the end of it, even though emails have a stigma of it being an outdated technology, it’s still being actively used by people around the world

As reported by Adestra, 85% of Adults and 78% of teenagers uses email daily. It’s clear that email will still be used often and it’s not going anywhere any time soon.

Note: Email is a technology that is continuously being improved, just recently, Google have released news on an experimental technology which allow emails to be more functionally interactive for users.

3. Email Marketing is Effective

Based on respectable sources such as OptinMonster, Hubspot, Chief Marketer and Email Monday, their statistics shows that the ROI of Email Marketing is much better when comparing it to direct mails and also the social media.

There’s also a reason on why it’s so effective, according to Adestra, consumers prefer email when communicating with brands.

Comparing to social media networks like Twitter, Facebook, consumers don’t have to struggle with the massive influx of tweets/posts/ads in their social network streams.

4. Email Marketing can be measured easily

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There are readily available metrics provided by Email Service Providers, they track data such as Open Rates, Click Through Rates, Unsubscribe Rates and many others.

With these metrics, you can understand your consumers better and also on how you can improve your strategy.

5. Email Marketing is personal!

While social media networks targets a wider and more general group of consumers, email marketing creates a personal communication channel between the brand and the consumer.

With analytics, segmentation and automation in play, you can create a very personal experience for your consumer by sharing useful and relevant information with them.

It’s like having a very good friend who understands your needs and providing you solutions for it.

6. Email Marketing is easy to start and maintain!

Correct, you saw that right, it’s easy to start and use.

Email Service Providers have a system that will cover your email marketing needs. If you’ve just started using Email Marketing, you’d probably won’t need the full suite of tools an Email Service Provider have.

This is not a problem because the free plans that they offer covers the basic needs of Email Marketing.

Basically all you need to do is to just sign up an account with your desired Email Service Provider and follow their Step By Step Instructions and you’ll be on your way to sending your First Email Marketing Campaign!

Other points to note:

It offers a higher organic reach, it attracts people who are genuinely interested in your product or service.
Email Marketing is instant and direct. Very effective when used in a time related campaign e.g. Timed Promotions
It can be used with other digital strategies(e.g. Social Media), no digital strategies should act alone. They should try to compliment each other to increase the strategy’s effectiveness.
Email Marketing builds credibility, strengthening consumer relationships and also builds consumer loyalty.

Here are some ideas for you on creating your first email marketing campaign:

Are you company that is actively involved with the community? How bout a monthly newsletter to inform your consumers about your business activities, products or services.
Do you have any sort of membership program going on? Use it as part of your program’s strategy to create a promotional email just for them!
Do you want to give back to your consumers by offering them something useful? Create an email to provide them useful freebies like an E-Books, promotion coupons or even a simple infographic!
You’ve got a new product coming in and you want to make sure your loyal consumers are the first to get it. Create an consumer-exclusive email and let them know that they were the first to know about your awesome product.

Things to look out for:

Make sure your emails are optimised for mobile readers. Most Email Service Providers have templates that are optimised for mobile readers and they are free!
Keep a lookout on the file size of your email template, the solution for this is to keep your emails simple. Keep your content light and not overload it for your consumers. E.g. Don’t create an e-newsletter containing 10 over rows of content!
Always check for grammar and spelling mistakes, make sure the text used in your images are legible for your consumers.
Don’t forget about having buttons as your call-to-action, hyperlinks are great but they are less accessible for your consumers. Make sure it’s obvious for your consumers.
Use Lead Pages as an alternate driver to acquire new consumers.
Always test your emails, you can use services like Litmus or you can just send it to your own email before sending it out to your consumers.
Lastly, be genuine about the message you’re about to convey to your consumers. Don’t start off your first Email Marketing Campaign with a spammy vibe.

Summary

To sum it up, Email Marketing’s stigma of being an outdated and ineffective technology is still being passed around. However as you can see, the data collected and presented says otherwise.

Email Marketing have been around for ages and will continue to be used by businesses of all sizes. In fact, the technology is being improved consistently by big brands like Google and Microsoft.

Not forgetting how powerful mobile phones are now, where checking an email becomes a simple task. We have exactly no reasons why we shouldn’t use email marketing as part of our business digital strategy.

I hope my insights have been useful to you and I hope you can start right away on your first email marketing campaign and succeed!

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