Know Why Email is a Keystone in Digital Marketing

Email marketing is still strong in 2019, but it redefined itself, especially when it’s implemented with all the other digital channels to achieve better digital marketing results. Email tools are becoming increasingly valuable to marketers as they provide them with a deeper understanding of what their customers and prospects expect.

Regardless of the rapid growth of social media, email is still actively engaging target audiences and providing customers with an efficient way to interact with businesses. Just like social media marketing or content marketing, email marketing is not a stand-alone strategy separated from the rest of digital marketing efforts. Today, we see a fusion of all these different channels, and email is not being left out.

According to Statista, the number of email users across the world will grow to 4.4 billion users in 2023. This creates enormous potential for digital marketers to incorporate email in all of their digital marketing strategies and even build some of these strategies around email.

Email Stays Strong

For more than a decade, email has been a consistently great way of interacting with customers and prospects in various industries. Although many assumed that with the rise of social media and other digital channels, email would lose its value and purpose in the marketing world, quite the opposite happened.

Businesses realized their customers prefer email marketing, no matter how many new channels were being created. Your target audience wants personalized content which is filled with information that’s valuable to them in a certain way. With 74% of marketers saying targeted personalization increases customer engagement, what is a better way to deliver it than with email?

Email in Digital Marketing Campaign

As there is an increasing demand for personalization in all B2B and B2C efforts, digital marketing campaigns have also become more personalized. Using the first name of your customer or prospect is simply not enough, you need to think bigger. After all, personalized emails will deliver you 6x higher transaction rates.

#1 Introducing the Campaign

Email is a fantastic way to introduce your campaign story. From providing a snippet from the digital campaign messaging to sharing details about how the idea for this campaign was born, you can engage your audience in a more meaningful way.

With email, you will encourage your email receivers to click through, visit your website or social media channels or purchase a certain product or service. There are plenty of ways any business can utilize email as a platform to improve their overall digital marketing results.

#2 Establishing a Long-term Connection with Customers

You can’t run a successful business if you don’t have a quality relationship with your customers. Email helps you to make those relationships last longer. As 50% of businesses feel they can increase interaction within email just by increasing personalization, isn’t email essential for building a beneficial relationship with your target audience?

When it comes to specific tactics on how to establish a long-term connection via email with your customers, these are just a few of them:

• Use analytics tools to see which part of your email is most interesting to your target audience. That way, you can understand what they prefer and shape your future emails accordingly.
• Encourage them to mention your activities on their social media platforms and make the most of their influence. This will help you build your online reputation and increase engagement and conversion rates.
• Allow them to experience your brand and your values through constant information about your employees and the company itself.

#3 Using Different Types of Content

Digital marketing is so much more than text. Content such as videos, quizzes, polls, and infographics has very high engagement and conversion rates. For instance, marketers who utilize video grow revenue 49% faster than those who don’t.

Your customers need something of additional value if you wish to keep them around. Luckily, email can deliver any type of content you want to show your appreciation. Moreover, email allows you to have constant interaction with your customers and prospects.

The Power of Versatility

Yes, there might be numerous benefits of focusing on email marketing, having a multichannel strategy where email is one of them or building your entire digital marketing strategy around email, but one of them is crucial: versatility.

You can easily integrate email to any of your inbound marketing strategies, whether it’s social media, blogging or something else. You can use this platform to:

• share your latest blog post,
• address or explain recent industry trends and your product updates,
• promote your special deals and events,
• announce your webinars or podcasts and increase the numbers of attendees, …

If you add marketing automation to all of that you can reach your objectives quicker and more easily. Sending targeting emails automatically will not require a lot of your time or money, but it will be tremendously effective and allow you to focus on other vital digital marketing activities as well.

With 81% of online shoppers who are interested in making a purchase just because they received a targeted email based on their previous shopping habits, the potential is definitely here. It’s up to you to discover the best tactic to motivate those customers and close the deal.

Final Thoughts

These days, businesses have so many different ways to engage their customers that it’s possible to overlook some of the oldest forms. However, email is not going anywhere as both customers and business still prefer them over some of the other forms. Digital marketing efforts are not as nearly efficient alone as they are when combined with email marketing.

After all, you don’t have to choose one over the other. A carefully crafted strategy can utilize several different channels if the messages and the entire communication process is perfectly aligned – well-timed, personalized and formulated the right way.

At the end of the day, there is only one channel which serves as the bridge that can connect your business with almost anyone you need in any part of the world – email. Its foundations are so firm and long-lasting that every nurtured relationship with your customers and prospects, wherever they are, must lead to a destination called success.