1. Email Marketing is Alive and Kicking
As online marketing technologies go, email marketing has been around for a very long time. But did you know that email marketing even predates the internet as most of us know it?
The very first email marketing message was sent in 1978 via the ARPANET system, a forerunner of the internet initially funded by the US Department of Defence and used in universities and research laboratories.
Sent on behalf of the now defunct computer manufacturer DEC, it hit a list of approximately 400 names. The campaign was widely criticised by its recipients, who had not requested to receive such marketing messages. This makes the problem of spam (unsolicited commercial email) as old as email marketing itself!
In the 35 years since that very first email marketing message was rather naĂŻvely sent, numerous other digital marketing technologies have come and (many have) gone. Internet banner adverts, pop-up and pop-under windows, interstitial web pages, paid search, comparison shopping, social media advertising, and behavioural and retargeting technologies, have all fought for marketing dominance, but none have achieved the success of email marketing.
Despite its age and the emergence of allegedly more sophisticated marketing techniques, email marketing remains the most cost effective â in terms of return on investment (ROI) â of any marketing technique (both on and offline).
According to the Direct Marketing Association in their 2011/2012 edition of The Power of Direct Marketing, email marketers could expect to see a return of just under $40 for every single dollar spent on the medium. This is compared to $7.25 from direct mail (catalogues), $8.26 from telemarketing and $19.71 from paid search.
Moreover, small and medium-sized businesses are continuing to invest more time, effort and money in email marketing. In an independent survey conducted by iContact at the close of 2012, 56% of businesses said they planned to increase their spend on email marketing in 2013 when compared to the previous year.
In the same survey, 83% of small and medium-sized business said email marketing is an important or critical part of their marketing strategy, demonstrating how ingrained email marketing is in the modern organisationâs marketing approach.
So what makes email marketing so successful? It can be attributed to a number of factors:
Solid relationships built through permission and trust
Permission and trust are the pillars of any successful email campaign. Throughout this book I will talk about how you gain permission as a marketer, build and retain trust, and as a result form solid relationships.
It is important to remember that the moment you find yourself operating outside of these three pillars you risk damaging your reputation and the success of any future email campaign your organisation sends.
Retention marketing vs acquisition marketing
Email marketing is often referred to as a retention marketing tool. This means it is used primarily to drive business from existing clients and contacts. Most other online marketing channels, such as paid search, comparison shopping and even online marketplaces like eBay and Amazon (along with many traditional marketing methods like print, radio and television advertising), are acquisition channels.
As anyone who has been in business for any significant period of time will tell you, it is much more cost effective to retain an existing client than acquire a new one.
Acquisition marketing will play an important role in any business as it reaches out to find new customers and generate leads. However, if you are paying expensive acquisition marketing rates to acquire the same customers time and time again, your profit earning potential will be severely hampered.
For this reason, I like to think of retention marketing techniques, like email marketing â used to drive repeat orders from expensively acquired customers and generate something called customer lifetime value â as the profitable component of more expensive acquisition marketing techniques.
Focusing on this profitability angle, here is an article looking at the profitability of pay per click that first appeared on iContactâs Blog (www.icontact.com/blog/email-marketing-and-social-media-the-profitable-components-of-ppc).
Email Marketing and Social Media: The Profitable Components of PPC
Have you been stung by pay-per-click (PPC) advertising?
Sure, itâs quick and easy to set up, and can be driving traffic to your website within a matter of minutes. But those keywords donât come cheap, and if you operate in a particularly competitive sector youâve got to either bite the bullet and invest heavily in search terms or develop a more strategic long-tail keyword strategy (and this will take time).
Naturally youâll want your potential customers to click on your ads. And it goes without saying that the search engines will make it as easy as possible for them to do so. But youâd rather not pay each and every time someone comes looking for you online.
Hereâs the problem â PPC is an acquisition tool, and acquiring customers via any channel is expensive.
Clever advocates will tell you that to profit from PPC youâll need to understand your customersâ lifetime value (LTV). But this doesnât work unless they stop clicking on your ads. Multiple clicks from repeat customers just mean that you are acquiring the same customers again and again.
So how do you ensure maximum profits across your customersâ lifetime and encourage repeat visits without paying through the nose for clicks?
Itâs easier than you might think with these four steps:
Relevant and intelligent use of email marketing and social media strategies will allow you to target existing customers, giving them the opportunity to return time and time again. You can then concentrate your PPC budget and strategy purely on acquisition, helping you build a clearer understanding of your customersâ lifetime value. Only then will you discover just how profitable your PPC campaigns are, allowing you to budget accordingly.
A more formal business environment
Email provides a formal business environment where people are happy to receive relevant, engaging and timely marketing messages. We use email to make enquiries, place orders, pitch products and services, host important conversations, store transactional receipts and send invoices. The email marketing inbox is very much a place of work.
Compare this to the social media environment. Although social media shares many of the attributes of email (permission, relevance, etc.), it offers a less formal environment and therefore is less welcoming to direct sales and marketing pitches.
Social media is a place where friends and family get together to hold conversations and share ideas and memories. If you can compare the email inbox to an office environment, social media is more like a bar or coffee shop, a place to hang out and not to be bothered by people trying to sell you something.
Social media makes email even more powerful
Just a few years ago, many technology pundits were predicting the demise of email marketing at the hands of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Fast forward to 2013 and there is a lot of humble pie being eaten as email marketing continues to grow in popularity and strength. In fact many of these pundits are now positioning email marketing as the first (albeit closed) social network.
As I have already stated, social media does not provide the formal environment required to position itself as a highly valuable sales venue. It is, however, a valuable influencer and will help keep your audience engaged until you have something to sell. In an ideal world you will have the same people following you on social media channels as you do in your email marketing list.
Many marketers are now integrating their email and social media marketing efforts to help spread their message beyond the reach of their list of email marketing subscribers and social media followers. Simple social media tools allow subscribers to share email marketing messages with their wider social networks. As birds of a feather flock together, a socially shared email has the opportunity to reach a massive, potentially receptive audience.
In this respect, you can now think of email marketing as something of an acquisition marketing tool as opposed to just a pure retention marketing tool. The great thing about using email to acquire new customers via social media is that it is essentially free. This is big news because the word free is rarely heard in conversations about acquisition marketing.
Email marketing goes beyond sales
Yes, email marketing is an amazing generator of profits, but its purpose goes way beyond the closing of the sale. There are a number of strategic reasons why you could employ email marketing. These might include:
- Positioning your brand/PR: A regular communication with your subscribers about projects you are working on, people you have hired, company developments, news, etc., can help your business raise its profile within the communities it serves. Donât think monthly newsletter, think PR opportunities as and when they arise.
- Delivering educational/thought leadership material: Building a perception of yourself as the go-to person or expert in a particular field will do a lot to raise your profile and ultimately win more sales in the long term. My first book, Becoming THE Expert, discusses in detail how any business can exploit the expertise they have in their particular industry to position themselves as an expert and attract attention.
- Traffic: Email is an incredibly cost-effective generator of traffic to a website. Traffic is the lifeblood of news and information sites which are monetised by advertising. The more valuable your content is to its readers, the more often you can get away with highlighting it via email.
- Placing your prospects into a holding pattern: In more complex sales scenarios, you might not have the manpower to manage (and close) all of your prospects. Or perhaps they are just not ready to drop quite yet. Email provides a fantastic tool to maintain and build those relationships while your sales team work through their prospect lists and develop your customer base.
All of the above points will of course help you generate sales and build potential profits. There is no getting away from it; email marketing, when combined with a few best practices (as detailed in this book), has an immense potential to generate profits.
The Right Time for Email is Now!
I speak to marketers every single day wh...