Email marketing is a popular means of promotion and its use is on the increase. This is because it represents a very effective means of online communication. Email campaigns can be produced quickly to allow your business to respond to market conditions swiftly.
Commentators predict email marketing will increasingly focus on subscriber engagement and list segmentation. Both of these trends reflect the importance of email marketing to business.
A report commissioned by Salesforce (PDF) called 2014 State of Marketing shed some interesting light on the importance of email marketing to business.
It found that 88 per cent of respondents (marketing professionals) used email marketing while 68 per cent of respondents indicated that they believe email to be core to their business.
The popularity of email marketing was underpinned by 58 per cent of respondents who said that they intend to increase their marketing spending on email marketing.
Some 57 per cent of respondents planned to increase the number of emails during 2014.
Engagement
The drive to engage stakeholders online is one of the main priorities for business today. Some ways to deliver this include:
- Mobile optimisation – better optimisation for mobile to ensure emailed content translates well to all mobile devices.
- Personalisation – email that is better targeted will achieve better results.
- Leverage of data – data has driven effective traditional marketing for some time. Its importance is now on the rise in email marketing as marketers seek to deliver more targeted messaging for better user engagement.
Segmentation
As yet not all businesses segment their email marketing lists. This is unfortunate as segmentation is a great way to increase engagement and conversion in email marketing. More targeted, smaller lists increase the chance of delivering relevant content to the right market segment. By dividing your company’s email list into highly targeted small sub-lists you can improve engagement with your stakeholders.
Here are some examples of list segmentation strategies:
- Prospects – separate these by their likelihood to buy
- Customers – by geography or life-cycle
- Big $ value buyers vs low $ value buyers
- Timed send outs – if you give subscribers the choice of how often to hear from your business, you can create sublists that reflect those timing intervals. This helps to ensure you don’t annoy your stakeholders with too many emails and lose their willingness to engage with you.
Email marketing, done well, can boost your stakeholder engagement considerably. If your business focuses on subscriber engagement and list segmentation you will no doubt see the benefits.
Fatpublisher provides email marketing services to our clients. If you are interested in finding out about our email marketing packages, please contact us.
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