Have you considered adding email marketing to your digital marketing mix in 2024? Not convinced you should jump in? As we hit Q4 we are busy talking to our clients about their 2024 strategy. And email marketing is high on the agenda.
According to Hubspot, 51% of marketers say email marketing is the most effective marketing channel and 53% of those surveyed reported that they were continuing to invest in email marketing in 2023.
Email marketing is particularly effective for:
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- Building relationships with customers: Email is a direct way to communicate with your customers. By sending them personalised, relevant and useful content, you can build trust and loyalty.
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- Promoting products and services: Email marketing is a tried and trusted method to promote products, services, offers and events to your target audience.
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- Driving traffic to your website: CTAs and links in your emails can drive traffic to your website and in turn help increase brand awareness and generate leads.
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- Nurturing leads: Email marketing is a great way to keep your leads warm and move them closer to a purchase decision.
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- Re-engaging inactive customers: If you have customers who have not been active in a while, you can use email marketing to re-engage them.
With the first email marketing campaign sent in 1978, it’s not a shiny, new channel, but it does offer eye-catching benefits to digital marketers:
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- Direct access to your customer’s personal inbox
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- The ability to own and control the channel
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- Average open rates and click rates of around 20% and 3% respectively (Campaign Monitor)
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- Strong performance for both B2B and B2C clients
Is email popular in Ireland?
Yes! The Central Statistics Office in Ireland reports that email remains the most popular activity carried out on the internet in Ireland. In a 2022 survey 91% of internet users used email. It was also the most popular internet activity carried out by both males (93%) and females (89%).
How to create an email marketing campaign
While there are many excellent platforms out there to use for email marketing, it’s imperative you don’t skip the first step, which is developing your email marketing strategy.
What to cover in your email marketing strategy
At Ebow we live and breathe digital strategy and for good reason. With no strategy you probably lack clarity about your goals or a plan to achieve them. So, before we design or write an email for a client we create an email marketing strategy that takes them through:
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- Setting goals – what are we trying to achieve and what does success look like?
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- Your target audience – who are we talking to, what do we want them to do?
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- Building your email list – where are the sources, touchpoints and incentives?
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- Segmenting your audience – because you want to make your communications more meaningful
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- Personalising your communications – because that’s what builds a relationship
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- Creating engagement – what style and personality are we bringing to this?
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- Mapping a content plan – how much, how often and what resources are needed?
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- Using marketing automation – to nurture and retarget your leads
It’s also really important to think about where you are sending your audience. The landing page your email links to needs to be visually consistent and deliver on the promise it gave.
How to write for email marketing
With a strategy in place we get our copywriters to start crafting the messages for your campaign. Remember, inboxes are personal space but they are also busy. So you need great writing to hook people in and engaging, consistent content to keep them reading and clicking.
Some tips for writing for email marketing
Use a familiar ‘from’ name. This could be a person’s name or your company name to make it personal and stand out in the inbox.
Spend time on your subject line. It should be short and benefit focused.
Remember to write preheader text. This is the short snippet of text that appears after the subject line in most email clients. Don’t waste this opportunity to encourage people to open.
This email from design tool Figma uses preheader text to get you excited.
Personalise your message. Because it’s nice for readers, shows a bit of care, and shifts you away from looking like a mass marketer.
Keep your body content simple and compelling. As with all online communications your writing should be focused, clear, and concise. Read it out loud to test it.
Liven things up with compelling images and video. But don’t overdo it and cause issues with load times.
Create white space. This may not seem like writing advice but it is. Short paragraphs and clear headings allow readers to scan easily.
Include a clear call to action. Tell your readers what you want them to do next, that might be watching a video, visiting a recipe page, or entering a competition.
Proofread please. Show your readers and brand some respect by checking for typos and grammatical mistakes.
Write for consistency. Your emails should use a tone of voice which fits with your website. Your reader should feel like they are moving, without friction, between channels and that you are delivering on your promise.
Remember to avoid long copy, over-communicating, asking nothing of your readers or expecting too much from them. You don’t want to push them towards the ‘unsubscribe’ button.
Talk to us about your email marketing plan
We use email marketing with great success for a range of clients in both B2B and B2C spaces.
With Théa Pharma we use email marketing automation for cart abandonment and lead nurturing. With B2B food giant Kepak, we developed a loyalty programme email strategy for food service businesses with their marketing team. The success is in the numbers. We hit our KPIs in the first month by over 100%. That’s down to working closely with the client team, sizzling copy and creative, and a strategy that gets the right message, to the right people, at the right time, on the right channel.
If you’re interested in creating success, sales and loyalty with email marketing talk to us.
