8 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Important For Inbound Marketing

If you want to get your content seen more than any other marketing channel, then email marketing is the ultimate marketing weapon you'll need. Because email marketing generally has a received rate between 85% to 95% based on your email service provider and content trends.  Today, we are going to discuss why email marketing is important, the good, the bad, and the wow.

Let's get started.

Why Email Marketing is Important?

There are more than 4 billion active email users. That means there' a steady stream of new customers and you just need to communicate with them in the right way! 

Does email marketing still make a difference in 2020? 

Let's find out the reasons...

1. Easy To Use

Email marketing is nothing but building a list who are interested in certain topics, beliefs, ideas, or products.

And creating a targeted email list is the most difficult part of email marketing strategy. It helps you to turn website visitors to potential customers. In fact, you don't need a list of 10,000 email subscribers to make sales. You need to find out those people who care about products and business.

But......

How do you build a targeted email list?

So there you have it! Now you are ready to go creating your first marketing campaign in MailChimp. I'll later show how to create email automation with MailChimp in another post. 

2. Action-Oriented & Scalable Features

When you have a targeted email list, you'll know what your audience cares about. That's the power of email marketing, knowing your customers clearly. You can take action based on their behaviour and choices. 

You can monitor them easily with email marketing software. A fully scalable option gives you more flexibility to see who's reacting, what are your missing part, and how to personalize the message for them. Email marketing helps you keep engaging repeat customers. Send personal message, remember their special occasions, follow-up even if they are not buying from you. You'll discover interesting correlation by tracking their purchase history. 

Therefore, Email marketing has high scalability and flexibility more than any other marketing channel.

3. Create Brand Awareness

In email marketing, you are making a direct and focused connection with your targeted list or existing customers. We don't do business with an unknown person. Before creating brand awareness, you need to earn trust, support, and credibility. 

Less Noise + Clear Brand Message = Stronger Customer Relationship

You can easily communicate with them any time from anywhere. Email marketing isn't distracting like commercial ads. You're reaching out to them with what they want. Essentially, this process increases your brand awareness. Use your business email instead of your personal one.

68% of Americans say they base their decision to open an email on the ‘From’ name. – Campaign Monitor

4. Automated Marketing Platform

Automation is just like how it sounds. Automating your messages saves a lot of your time, effort, and money. You just have to make an email sequence to perform a common action. Set it up and forget! It'll automatically keep tracking the campaign for you.

Let's say you've got an audience base from 10 different countries. Different countries have different times, cultures, and events that mean the same message won't work well for all of them.

And you don't have patience and time to do it manually.  Make an automated sequence based on time, buying history, buying behavior, and demographic preferences. It'll increase your sales by 10x.

5. More Value, More Leads

People, in general, don't care about you and your products, they only care about them. You need to answer the question that how your products are going to make their life better. Giving them value will turn out to be more conversion.

By sharing informative content that improves your reader's lifestyle helps you create value inside your messages. You can definitely do social media marketing or trendy influencer marketing but all of these are vanity metrics. Making a decision based on unscaleable parameters(like, comment, share) may not work for your business. We don't understand how it's misleading us because most of the business owners celebrate short-term gain over long-term sustainable marketing plan. Creating value for your target audience is the main difference between traditional marketing and interent marketing. 

6. Evergreen Content

Content that helps people over a long period of time is called an evergreen topic. When you serve a specific group of people, you are going to deliver every aspect of their life. Creating content in line with your business will maximize conversions and sales. Your content will be their go-to guide for the products/service you are willing to sell.

The Adblock users are increasing day by day which means wasting money on ads is no longer a good marketing strategy in 2020. According to Statista, avarage global adblocking rate was estimated at 27% in 2018. We want distraction-free life and this rate is increasing day by day. Email insures your messages are distraction free and alive 24/7 at their inboxes. If you want to acquire new customers, there is no better option than providing values with evergreen content.

7. Affordable Price

Based on email service provider(ESP), it costs free to $100+ per month. There are dozens of ESPs to choose and they have different missions for a specific customer base. It’s all about you finding what you actually need. And it doesn’t matter what ESP you pick, maximizing your email marketing by avoiding spam folder should be your main concern. A good ESP should have features like: Drop & Drag Editor, easy to manage contact list, personalized email template, accurate tracking systems, and fast learning curve.

I’m not going to stretch this more as I’ve showed the calculation above. Every $1 you invest in email marketing will turn ROI of 4300%. To gain such ROI, you have to research your audience. Pick MailChimp if you are completely new to email marketing and when you get the grip, go for Drip! Here are the 10 Best Email Service Providers:

But how do you choose the right one for you?

How to Choose A Good ESP

There are hundreds of email service providers out there. Finding the right one for you is overwhelming. We frequently asked why we can't use Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo as an ESP?

Email marketing in its broad sense wholely depends on how your customers or readers react to your messages. Do they read them, when do they open your emails, do they click on the links that redirect them to your product pages, or your emails are staying on their spam folder? Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo are not helping you with these valuable information. ESPs like MailChimp is here to analyze your email marketing performance and readers engagements. 

These customers-end insights may enhance your profit in many folds. As different ESPs have different focuses, you should pick the one that suits your marketing goal. I've a list of parameters for choosing the right ESP. Here's the list:

 Tag-based System: We are pretty familar with this word "tag". It is a way of specializing your target audience. Tags are used to track people and helps you sending the right messages to right people. Let's you own a food restaurant and runs a website. Two of email subscribers: Sansa and Kim, Sansa who likes Burger(you stored the data when she signed up for email newsletter and you labeled this data to her name) and Kim likes Pizza. 

In a list based system, you can't address prospects specifically because you are sending based on lists. In somecases Sansa can like both Burger and Pizza. If you use list based system, she is going to get two emails for the same offer. In tag based system, you can easily target customers by tags. Delivering one offer at a time is the most important marketing tactic in inbound marketing. Popular Tag-based email marketing softwares are: ActiveCampaign, Drip, Keap(Formerly Infusionsoft), and Ontraport.

 Lead Scoring: Lead scoring process helps you finding the potential customers. Assume you have 5,000 of email subscribers and all of them are not solely interested to your offer. Some of them are interested in your content but they are not ready to buy from you. Others are getting to know how you can help them with your products that means they are getting ready to convert.  But how do you know which ones are going to be your customers?

Lead scoring!!

When you create an email campaign to target audience, it starts with joining to your newsletter by submitting an email address. Then email automation will start to do things sequencially as you set it up. It stores the customer database for future marketing campaigns, and sends thank you email for subscribing to your newsletter. They get emails, open emails, read email content if find something interesting click links, visit your websites and read blogs, watch webinar, download casestudy, visit pricing page, and request for free trial. Design user-friendly website rather confusing visitors with complex elements and graphics. We follow five key elements to design an engaging site for our clients. 

But very few subscribers actually follow this sequence. Finding the right subscribers can be game changing. Your email software must have features to score the leads based on their actions.

Conditional Logic: Your ESP should have feature like If/then workflows which means if someone likes kitchen category he/she may like other stuffs related to kitchen. Basically you can upsell more products/services within one  marketing funnel. In simple words, with conditional logic you can send personalized email by creating sequences based on the actions taken by your email subscribers.  

 Advantageous pricing: There are expensive one and the cheapest one. It's up to you which one fits your needs. Keap and Ontraport souly dedicated to tech-savvy marketers and expensive for small business owners with a limited marketing budget. If you have 500-1000 subscribers, it doesn't make sense spending too much as there are cheaper options available. As an email marketing manager, you should trial any marketing tactic before it achieves sustainablity. You'll find advantageous pricing helpful in your email marketing journey. 

 Easy UI/UX: As a marketer, most of us don't know that much of technical things and it sometimes overwhelming to get started. Clean, seamless design and interactive user interface can be a good solution to this. ESPs like Keap, ontraport are bit complex and suitable for tech-savvy email marketers. It's totally depends on you how you want to get started.

If you've never used any marketing software for email automation, i'd recommend you get your hands dirty with beginner-friendly one like MailChimp. Knowing all the basics, it'll be easy to adjust with complex one Drip, AWeber, or Keap. Whenever you are done testing 3-4 ESPs, start with the one you find easy and fit your requirements. Don't count this as expense, it's a kind of investment that has tons of game-changing impacts over the period of your marketing journey.  

 Good Deliverability: Deliverability matters the most in email marketing. It means you are hitting subscribers inboxes. Unsuccessful email deliverablity results in unsuccessful email campaign. The higher the deliverablity rate, the better it is for your marketing funnel. If you are landing in their spam folders, you may be blacklisted or affect your reputation as sender. Most ESPs have avarage deliverability rate of 85%-90% or above that means you don't have to worry about it. 

Ability to Create Forms: Forms are used for collecting and storing important contact information. General type of form feilds ask for first name and email address. Creating HTML forms increases the possibility to hit spams. Forms are your very first impression whether someone is going to sign up for your email list or not. It has great impact building a strong and trust-worthy customer relationship. Therefore, doing it in proper way smooths the process of customer acquisition. 

We personally use Kajabi and Drip together. Why Kajabi?

• One-stop Business Solution
• Broadcasts and Automated Sequences 
• Product & Membership Portal
• Affiliate Management System
• Page & Funnel Builder
• Shopping Cart

All these elements have significant role in our business growth. Each business is different regards to its customer base and marketing plan. But core business is spreading the marketing message to achieve the desired customer acqusition rate. And now it comes to you sorting out the top priorities and creating a fail-proof marketing landscape before sticking to any email service provider. Or you can outsource marketing agency and stay out of hassles.  

8. Device Friendly

90% of the electronic devices are connected to Google mail server. It’s easy to use, responsive, compatible with multiple browsers. The syncing feature also makes it comfortable for the users. Whatever devices your consumers use, you don’t have to use this anymore. The cross-device adaptability of email marketing increases its effectiveness in many folds. If you want, you can also personalize your message based on smartphone users or PC users. 

Email marketing has such a kind of flexibility any marketers need. Remember, your marketing emails look professional, doesn't contain spammy links and build engagement among subscribers. If you are not good at it, don't think twice to buy marketing services. In the end, responsive email design matters.  

Wrap Up

Email marketing is a powerful way to acquire new customers and building strong user base digitally. In today's marketing world, there are other online marketing channels but the key difference is email marketing is an uninterrupted market strategy. Armed with email marketing tactics, you understand that it is all about content marketing and creating a mailing list. 

One of my favorite marketing specialist once said:

"The best time to start a list is five years ago. The second best time is today."