Email marketing: an essential in your marketing strategy

Email marketing sounds so 2008. Yet, email marketing tactics are proving to be some of the most profitable strategies that can be measured on the web. In fact, 59% of marketers (Emma, ​​2018) declare that it is the source of traffic offering the best return on investment (ROI). According to a study conducted by Litmus Research in 2019 (available on the Hubspot website), 73% of millennials prefer to receive business communications by email and 59% of respondents are influenced by emails in their decision-making process. Also, 78% of marketers would have seen an increase in engagement with their mailings in the past 12 months. Finally, according to the Content Marketing Institute, 31% of B2B marketers mention that the newsletter is the best way to reach prospects.

All of these stats show how powerful email marketing really is. Much more than sending emails or simple newsletters, email marketing allows you to intelligently and efficiently use your customer data in order to make them profitable.

For example, in the case of an online business, we could talk about transactional automations, or even automatic mailing based on segmentation data (birthday, purchase recency, etc.). A sum of several actions will lead to effective emailing campaigns.

This article will present the reasons why it is relevant to implement email marketing actions. Important point: no one needs a marketing agency to get the ball rolling. In other words, it is better to design imperfect actions, than to do nothing at all. The simple fact of having an audience and a recurring and relevant newsletter is a good start. Several resources are available to learn the basics of Email Marketing (EMM) and will be mentioned in this article.

Why integrate email marketing campaigns into your digital strategy?

# 1: The potential of the return on investment (email marketing ROI)

The famous ROI – a concept present in all spheres of our life. Finance, time management, love; it is all a question of the opposition between cost and gain.

When we talk about email marketing, the measurement of return on investment is more complex, for the simple reason that there is no “media” budget directly invested through emailing actions, which would be the case in an advertising campaign on Instagram, for example.

Investment to expect for the management of emailing campaign:

• Writing: the time required to write certain texts for your email automations (often in at least 2 languages), as well as periodic newsletters.
• Visual creation: the time required to create key visuals (images, videos). Tip: These can easily be reused from your website or social medias
• Tool: the cost of emailing tools such as Mailchimp or Klaviyo should be taken into consideration.
• Campaign management: the time required to create, modify and analyze your efforts.
• Indirect budget: indirectly, you will invest to improve your email marketing audiences, whether through a sponsored contest on Facebook, or the cost of acquiring a new customer.
• Time saving (positive point): the fact of setting up actions in line with the concept of marketing automation will save you a lot of time. Imagine an online business that sells low-involvement products (spontaneous purchases) for tens of thousands of dollars per month. It’s a safe bet that, every month, several hundred people add at least 1 product to their shopping cart, without completing the transaction. Imagine the (crazy) time it would take to write to each of these potential consumers, one by one. Of course, a “drop cart” automation can easily be integrated with an email marketing tool. It’s basic !

That being said, it’s difficult to quantify the ROI, but it will definitely be positive if you invest your resources in a smart way and if your audience has some volume.

# 2: The ease of designing and measuring your email marketing campaigns

After profitability, the fact that the integration of email marketing actions is relatively easy, and user friendly weighs (positively) heavy in the balance. Hundreds (if not thousands) of email marketing tools / software are available in the market. Yes, truly a lot. Some of the more popular are: Klaviyo (Rablab is Klaviyo Partner), Mailchimp, Omnisend, Campaign Monitor, SharpSpring, Hubspot.

Each tool has strengths and weaknesses, and has pricing methods that may be different. Before choosing a tool, I obviously recommend that you first compare them with each other, but also to remember to confirm the synergy with your technological tools (your site / CMS, your ERP, etc.). Tip: ask your network for advice on using any software ..!

Some platforms are easier to use – although more restrictive, while others are a bit more complex and provide a wider range of possibilities.

To follow up on a statement made at the beginning of this article, you do not need a specialist or a marketing agency to launch certain actions. On the other hand, if your audiences are considerable, and you want to focus more on marketing automation, analysis, carrying out A / B tests and obtaining recommendations, the role of a specialized agency will make perfect sense.

Among the most commonly analyzed metrics, we find:

• Delivery of your mailings (deliverability)
• Open rate of your mailings
• The click-through rate (CTR) of your mailings
• The volume of traffic generated to your website (or other destination)
• The most viewed pages from your mailings (via Google Analytics)
• The sales generated by your mailings (conversion rate)
• The evolution of your audiences: subscriptions vs unsubscribes
• The performance of your A / B tests, especially on the subject of your mailings
• Other angles of analysis: time / day of mailings, call-to-action buttons, content, target audience, benchmark *

What is the value of a statistic without context? Here is a full comparison provided by Mailchimp. On average:

• 21.33% open rate
• 2.62% click rate
• 0.26% unsubscribe rate

Source: Mailchimp, October 2019

# 3: The opportunity to make profitable its web marketing actions and its audiences

While email marketing is a primary tactic in a digital marketing plan, other strategies are just as important. We can think of the content strategy, investments through search engines (Google Ads / Google Adwords), Social Media Marketing (article on topic just here) or SEO efforts.

Interestingly, these tactics are complementary, and your email marketing strategy (marketing automation) will allow you to monetize data acquisition from SEM, SMM and SEO.

# 4: The chance of maintaining a relationship with the consumer

A fourth reason to integrate email marketing campaigns into your digital strategy is to develop and maintain a certain relationship with your consumers. Getting in touch on a regular basis, and at convenient times, can help to stay in the minds of your clients, and thus increase your results in the medium and long term. Several brands use emailing to announce new products, to position themselves in the face of social issues, to introduce employees, etc. The possibilities are truly endless, and you just need to be creative and follow a brand guideline.

Whether your email marketing strategy is built for an e-commerce, or for lead generation (generation of prospects), the notion of nurturing the relationship with an existing or potential customer is fundamental, and the email marketing can carry this mission.

Real life example : Contact Lens King

A great example using user data to nurture the customer relationship in a smart way is the following real life case (I wear contact lenses) with Contact Lens King. About 2 years ago, I realized that I was paying way too much for my lenses by buying them from my optometrist. While browsing the web, I quickly came across Contact Lens King, which offer extremely competitive prices.

When making a purchase on their website, we create a profile and save our prescription details there. During the checkout, Contact Lens King has the intelligence to ask us if we would like to have a reminder (automatically sent by email) to renew our purchase in 3 months, 6 months, 12 months or not. Simple, but ingenious. With the volume of customers they have, imagine the profitability of having this kind of automated mailing that generates a ton of recurring purchases, without any effort. I recently received a reminder and converted a few weeks later, receiving a communication from them providing me with a 10% discount.

Local flavors

Here is a list of some of our clients who design really nice newsletters.

• • La Maison Lavande | Lavander based products (register via the website home page)
  • Horace Jewelry | Jewelry made for her in Quebec (register via the site’s home page, at the bottom)
  • Audvik  | Winter coats made in Quebec (register via the site’s home page, at the bottom)

Last word

I hope this article was able to introduce you in a great way to email marketing – a very interesting universe which combines creativity and analytics, and which is at the crossroads between sales / marketing and customer experience.

* To be monitored in the near future: evolution of tools, hyperpersonalization, hypersegmentation, automation, evolution of anti-spam / other type laws, user data protection, SMS sending and application marketing (notifications vs emails).

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