Email marketing is marketing a commercial message directly to the people using emails. It is one of the most effective marketing tools for it is a very highly targeted advertising approach. In this type of marketing audiences by opting in to receive emails have given you consent to send them emails. Besides, the cost of sending a single email is almost negligible when compared to the cost involved in other marketing channels respectively. On top of that e-mail marketing also allows businesses to undertake a personalized marketing approach. In short email marketing is
• Affordable
• Simple and quick
• Personal and customizable
• Relationship focused
• Action-oriented
• Measurable
• More popular than social media
• Mobile and global
But this was just about how email marketing can help you, looking at the big picture; let’s see why it has become so crucial for your business at present.
Some stats and figures related with email marketing
• 91% of consumers check their email daily
• 74% of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email
• The average click-through rate for B2B marketing emails in Q2 2013 was 1.7%
• 60% of marketers believe email marketing produces positive ROI
• 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message
• Email marketing has an ROI of 4,300%
• 76% of email opens occur in the first two days after an email is sent
• 48% of emails are opened on mobile devices
• Email marketing as a channel was the third overall lead generation source for marketers in 2013, producing 13% of all leads.
• People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people that do not receive email offers.
• 37% said that more than 20% of their inbox comes from marketers, and 53% said they’re happy with the number of marketing emails they get.Hence, it is evident from the stats that selling your product through email marketing can be far easier than what it is in other marketing channels if you know the ways to carry it out effectively.However, in spite of being a powerful marketing channel, there are a few challenges that are associated with email marketing. Let me go ahead and acquaint you with the most common challenges with resolutions to them.
Challenge#1: Integration of email data with other data systems
Most of the times in marketing you need to amass valuable data across different channels to conduct things more efficiently and prudently. Whether it is about your sales funnel or content delivery, if you can integrate the email data with other data systems, optimization of each becomes easier and result oriented.
For instance, if you can relate the landing pages with emails you would be able to track the sales process of an email conversion easily. Not just that, because you can optimize your content for user experience, it not only improves your sales cycle but gives subscribers a more pleasant experience for they are getting what they wanted from you.
Challenge#2: Deliverability Improvement
Hopefully you all must be aware with what is deliverability rate. Still to brush your knowledge on it, it as the name signifies is the percentage of email messages delivered to your recipients’ inboxes versus the total number of messages sent. In short, it tells you about the number of emails that got bounced back.
Now, even there are two types of bounces –soft bounces and hard bounces. Temporary in nature, soft bounces take place when any incoming message is rejected by the server such as in case when your recipients’ inboxes are full, while hard bounces are kind of permanent problem in delivering an email such as when the addresses that you are sending emails to are bad or don’t exist.
Your internet service provider (ISP) might block you due to a low deliverability rate. Besides, no matter whether you have acquired it legitimately, your ISP can mark abandoned email addresses as spam traps. Moreover, you are wasting your time and money both on sending emails to non-existent addresses.
Hence, make sure you clean up your email list by removing the unengaged addresses. As far as identifying these addresses is concerned, you can take the help of metrics like opens, clicks and so on. If possible, go ahead and redefine your opt-in process by either employing double opt-in or asking people to enter their email address twice.
Challenge#3: Growth and retention of Subscribers
I know augmenting the size of the email list and retaining your subscribers isn’t that easy. In fact, a recent study revealed that the average email list exhibits a depreciation of 25% every year. And so, many companies in order to convalesce from this depreciation purchase the mailing list and end up getting into trouble by polluting their entire database. The addresses might be invalid or even if they are valid, the new recipients perhaps will not be interested in your content and might unsubscribe or overlook your emails.
Purchasing email list isn’t the right practice instead you should try earning your subscribers by helping them out with your email and its content. It could be anything a special offer or some useful tips on the subjects that are related to your audience’s concern and so on. Besides, testing is the word, keep testing your emails for results.
How DSIM will help you overcome these challenges
Table of Contents
Table of Contents