5 Reasons You Need Email Marketing Campaigns

5 Reasons You Need Email Marketing Campaigns:

from B2B Marketing and Lead Generation | Optify by Shanelle Smith

All too often I talk to agencies that don’t offer email marketing campaigns as a service for their clients. This always leaves me puzzled because as a small business owner on a budget, email campaigns are my bread and butter, next to word of mouth. They are easy to do, drive lots of traffic and lead to more sales than any other marketing campaign I’ve attempted. Email campaigns are the basis of my entire month, and my mom (business partner) literally schedules her trips (flight attendant) around when we are doing new email campaign promotions.
Agencies have the opportunity to manipulate their clients’ revenue streams around email marketing campaigns and grow their clients’ house lists through email, SEO, social media, PPC, etc.
I wanted to write this post to highlight the major reasons why email marketing campaigns are so effective and as an attempt to put some noise in the way of SEO and social media. Studies have shown that SEO and social media results aren’t even close to the results from email campaigns. Of course, SEO, social media and other marketing tactics are important as well for their own reasons, but in terms of cost-per-leads generated, email marketing takes the cake.
Here are 5 reasons why you absolutely need email marketing campaigns:

1. Return on Investment

According to the Direct Marketing Association, the ROI for email marketing in 2012 was 4,300% — or for every dollar you spend, you make $43. Direct mail and print only have a 1 to 3% ROI.
On top of that, DMA forecasted that email marketing produced $67.8 billion in sales in 2012 and will produce $82.2 billion in 2016. In contrast, social media has an average conversion of less than 2%.

2. Cost

Depending on what type of software solution you use for email marketing campaigns, your budget could be $0 (i.e., MailChimp), or hundreds of thousands of dollars sending to millions of contacts. Typically, email costs about $0.01 to send to a single recipient. Compared to other marketing channels, email simply wins on budget; for example, direct mail typically costs about 100 times more than email.

3. Visibility

Email marketing campaigns give you more visibility than most other channels. In fact, it’s the only marketing channel that has the ability to reach 100% of its target audience. Email has the maximum potential delivery rate because you’re sending marketing directly to an individual’s email box. If you follow the rules by only sending to opted-in lists and use a whitelisted email provider, your delivery, open and click thru rates will be much higher. TV commercials average 30 seconds of visibility and only 10-15% of audiences using Facebook EdgeRank Algoritihm are exposed to paid ads.
You can manipulate how many people see your campaign by sending it at an optimal time and day that performs well for your targeted market. According to GetResponse, Thursday is the best day to send emails, looking at overall results for open rates and CTR.

4. Targeting and Segmentation

Unlike most marketing campaigns (with the exception of paid social media ads and SEO/PPC), email marketing lets you target and segment your personas. Depending on the email system you use, you can filter the personas by things like customers, prospects, opportunities, or mothers age 40+ vs. males age 20-30. Segmentation typically comes from the landing page conversion.

5. Real-Time Metrics and Autoresponders

Email campaigns give you the ability to see performance metrics starting right when you send the campaign. It typically takes about 3 days total to give you the final metrics for opens, clicks, visits, unsubscribes and soft bounces (to account for people who don’t open their emails right away). Some email campaign software can give you visitor intelligence from the email or new form submissions/purchases.
You can also set up autoresponders that automatically send an email after a visitor converts on a landing page. Autoresponders can significantly increase your businesses visibility, as new prospects are being exposed via organic search, paid search or simply direct from word of mouth.
If you are running into trouble trying to convince a client to convert prospect names through landing pages or use email as a marketing channel, hopefully this post will help you do some selling!