Does email marketing still work?
20/08/2018
With the rise of social media, you may be asking yourself if sending marketing emails is still worth it. The answer is yes, and we take a look at why!
More than 82% of adults use emails every day in the UK. Furthermore, over 85% of adults in the UK use a smartphone, which means email remains an accessible form of communication between you and your subscribers. On average, every £1 spent on an email campaign results in a £32.28 return, which makes email marketing a viable and important part of your marketing strategy.
The industries boasting the best open rates, with over 30%, are Restaurants & Food, Non-profits, Health Care, Arts & Entertainment, Automotive, Publishing, Education and Sports & Activities. Similarly, the best performing industries for click through rates (CTR's) are Arts & Entertainment, Publishing, Education, Health Care, Financial Services and Automotive.
Like all forms of marketing however, executing a bad email campaign can harm your engagement with customers and even reduce the size of your audience, since people can easily unsubscribe. For that reason, we take a look at a few important do's and don'ts to help improve your success:
Do ensure it’s easy for clients to find the content you want them to.
By including obvious call to actions and links, with short, interesting copy and some relevant images, this will help keep someone engaged with your email and get you the conversions you want. One company found that by having three or less images and around 20 lines of text in your email resulted in the best click through rates.
Do look at the data collected from past email campaigns to see what your customers prefer to click on.
By doing this, you can group recipients into categories of email preferences. After you have that information, you can then tailor your message content and who you send them to in the future, which will be much more effective as the recipient will want to open an email that is more interesting to them. Furthermore, emails which include the recipients’ first name in the subject line increase open rates by 26%, over those that are generic. Did you know the time you send your emails is important too? The highest click through rates are at 11am and 6pm, so get your emails sent before then to be at the top of their inbox!
Don’t flood your recipients inboxes.
To ensure you keep as many subscribers as possible, try not to bombard them with too many emails, or up to 78% of people may unsubscribe from you altogether. Research has shown that 61% of people don't mind receiving a promotional email about once a week, however further studies have found that sending an email every 2 weeks is the "sweet spot", where people like to be reminded about your presence, and are less likely to unsubscribe from you for receiving your emails.
Don’t forget to optimise your emails for mobile viewing.
It’s important to keep your email designs up to date and mobile friendly, with so many people using smartphones to access their emails. From creating a new mobile friendly template, simplifying your current template to make it easier to read on mobiles, to making your call to actions mobile friendly, keeps users reading your emails. If your email isn’t mobile friendly, many users will simply delete the email or try to read it later on a desktop computer. Only 11.3% would try and read it on their phone unoptimised.
If you are looking to increase sales, then vouchers or promoting sales are very easy to do via email and people are more inclined to read the email if it means they might save some money from doing so! However, if you would like more traffic in general or to keep your subscribers informed with what you are doing, then sending short but relevant information will keep people engaged in your company.
If you’d like to find out about how email marketing could help you, please contact us today!