Whether it’s social media, SEO or content marketing, you’ve obtained lots of choices when it comes to marketing your business online. However, when it comes time to have a sales conversation and drive conversions, there’s a channel that continues to outperform the rest: good old-fashioned email marketing.
According to current research and surveys:
- Email has an ROI of around 4,300% (based on the Direct Marketing Association)
- 80% of people say they obtain marketing messages alongside their private emails every day.
- 70% of people make use of coupons or discounts they find out about from email.
- 60% of people say that receiving particular offers is the top reason they subscribe to an email listing from an enterprise.
In different words, in case your e-commerce enterprise hasn’t taken the time to adopt email marketing, then you’re leaving cash on the table.
And if these stats do not convince you, listed here are some other factors that may motivate you to begin building your email marketing list right now.
Email marketing Is Outperforming Facebook and Twitter for Selling Stuff Online
The top social networks that most small companies use are Facebook and Twitter – and historically they have been great free tools for content distribution.
However when you have a Facebook fan page, then maybe you’ve got heard that only about 16% of your followers will actually see the updates you post to your timeline.
That’s because Facebook wants you to purchase their advertising to advertise your message. That even has some considering it a bad investment for the small company.
Facebook isn’t the only social network where your reach will be limited. If people are utilizing the Twitter search to find info, they have to particularly click on “All” to see all tweets or profile bios with a particular keyword.
Developers also have the choice to use a filter in the Twitter APi that will value tweets as none, low, medium, or high that means that customers of these functions could miss out on tweets that algorithmically take a look at as having little value. So again, small businesses not investing in advertising might see a decline in engagement.
In brief, you can’t just assume that in case your target audience is on Facebook or Twitter at the time you post a new update, they’ll see it.
More importantly, when it comes time so have a sales conversation with your viewers, email marketing simply outperforms social media.
Custora recently did a study that analyzed data from 72 million clients purchasing on 86 different retailer websites.
They discovered that over the past 4 years, online retailers have quadrupled the rate of consumers acquired via email to nearly 7 %.
Meanwhile Facebook and Twitter barely registered.
Additionally, they discovered that the average buyer lifetime value (CLV) of users acquired through email is considerably higher than those coming from social media.
However, email marketing is not only a superior channel for buyer acquisition. Some people are seeing it driveway more visitors than social as well.
Noah Kagan sent a tweet to his 13,000 Twitter followers recently. It obtained 109 clicks for a click-through-rate (CTR) of 0.8%.
He sent the similar info to his email list of 3,547 people and obtained 882 clicks for a CTR of 24.8%. An 8x improvement over Twitter. (Hat tip to Justin Premick for this data).
The reason email marketing is so much more effective at driving visitors and sales is since you get to take the conversation about your merchandise and enterprise to your clients most personal online space – their inbox.
While platforms like Facebook and Twitter are nice for free content distribution and fascinating your community, they’re additionally noisy and your viewers might not be on them if you post an update.
Email, however, gets seen every time.
Google is Making Search Rankings Harder to Acquire
As the CLV graph above shows, clients coming from both paid and organic search are extremely valuable to your enterprise. But climbing the search rankings in Google is becoming harder and harder.
For those who keep up with the latest in SEO news, you probably know that lots of the tried and true strategies that SEO’s have used in the past to gain higher keyword rankings are being devalued by Google.
Algorithmic changes have (rightfully) targeted low high-quality content material (building hyperlinks through article marketing and blog networks), keyword-based anchor text (trying to rank your men’s clothes firm by making a high volume of links utilizing that term), paid links (sometimes links which are sitewide in sidebars or footers), and lots of other linking methods.
And the latest tactics which are under scrutiny include guest posts, infographics, and press releases.
This has put many companies which have used these into the famed Google penalty box, and lots of more enterprise in a state of constant fear that they could lose their rankings in the future.
Most of the SEO methods which are safe and work well (like content material marketing) take time to build upon before desired rankings are achieved, leaving new companies with only one choice to get on the first page rapidly: buying Google AdWords. The ins and outs of PPC could be enough to make one’s head spin.
That is why companies which are investing in PPC to construct their mailing list. This method, instead of just getting a potentially one-time click in search, they’re opening the door to future communications with their target buyer base. One that they do not have to worry about getting penalized.
Email is Content Marketing’s Best Friend
Content marketing is undoubtedly the hottest marketing technique right now since it could help you in both of the above areas. It offers you something to share and promote on social media, and it also helps you earn more rankings in search outcomes.
The trouble with it is, the quality content material takes a major investment. First, you must decide what to concentrate on. Do you want to have text-based blogs posts? Video explainer videos and commercials? Slideshare presentations? Fun and informative podcasts? Viral infographics?
Then, you must decide who’s going to create all of that content for you. Do you have an in-house group of content material creators? Do you outsource? How do you discover somebody who excels at creating different types of media?
In other words, content material marketing is hard. The thing is, it works. Really, really well.
And that is why collecting email addresses from your visitors are so necessary. It offers you a method to keep in touch and follow up with them over time and ensures all of the money and time you’ve spent on creating content is not just leading to one-time visits.
Not to mention building a mailing list to consume your content is going to assist improve your overall conversions as you will see more purchases from your email list than your blog readers, YouTube subscribers, or podcast listeners as mentioned above.
Email Drives Traffic and Sales
Now that why you need a mailing listing of your e-commerce enterprise, let’s check out what you can do with it. Relying on the service provider you select to deliver your email content, you can use your mailing listing to achieve your clients in a wide variety of ways (which we’ll be exploring more deeply in future posts).
Listed here are just a few ideas to get you excited.
- Let clients learn about your new merchandise and other interesting firm news that impacts them.
- Arrange autoresponders – a series of drip emails with the purpose of getting a buyer to purchase or learn more about your merchandise over time.
- Send timed discounts for holidays, birthdays, and other private occasions (anniversaries, for instance).
- Remind customers about an uncompleted purchase in their purchasing cart.
- Reward loyal customers with a discount.
- Re-engage with clients who haven’t shopped in a while by providing them a discount to stop by.
- Get testimonials from clients.
- Share your latest content (blog posts, videos, and so on.) with your clients to engage without a sales focus.
As you may see, you may engage your clients via email in much deeper methods and use it to drive traffic to your e-commerce site.
While social media and search are nice methods to get found by your clients, email marketing is the way to really construct a relationship with them.