Why Direct Email Marketing Still Works

Recently, we’ve had a lot of questions come up around email marketing, and whether or not it’s still an effective method for marketing. It’s a fantastic question, and one I would like to spend the next few minutes answering.

The short answer is yes! It is absolutely effective if you understand how to use email marketing to your advantage. Unfortunately, email marketing has gotten a bad reputation because, lets face it, we ALL get a lot of spam emails.

However, when you are providing value and someone agrees to sign up for your email list, they’re ASKING you for your content because they find value in it. This should not be understated or overlooked. They’re finding value in you or your content and these people become potential prospects as customers. This is an opportunity to showcase your knowledge, expertise, and skills within your chosen field.

Today, I’d like to share with you 6 reasons why email marketing still works, and although it’s not the flashiest, it is still one of the most cost effective ways to communicate with your audience and create brand awareness, loyalty, and prospects.

7 Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Works

It’s Personalized Communication

One of the best things about email, is it gives you the chance to personalize communication. We all know that this might be a merge field, but when I see my name in an email, it makes me stop for an extra few seconds because someone used my name. It’s a natural response. Consider the last time you were in a store or public place and you heard someone calling out your name and later realized they were looking for someone with the same name. While in the end, they weren’t searching for you, it got your attention long enough for you to stop, look around, and wonder who is looking for you.

Email marketing is the same way. Personalized emails are an opportunity to get someone to stop, take a look at your email and scan through the first few lines of content. If they realize this email isn’t for them, that’s fine. The goal is to get them to open your email and decide if your offer is worth their time. Take personalization a step further and share a personal story of yours that can draw in the reader before hitting them with the subject or goal of your email. Looking to sell a service or product, tell a brief personal story (no more than 3-4 sentences) to get that emotional connection with your reader.

It’s Consistent

Consistency is key to winning at email marketing. We may not know the right time for a potential buyer to pull the trigger, but they do. Maybe they received your email a month ago and thought you had a great offer but it really wasn’t the right time to take action. They needed a little bit of time to think about it or their business wasn’t really in a position to take action. 

What happens a month later when things change in their business and they start looking for the services you offer? Chances are, they are not going to remember the email you sent them a month ago, and unless you’ve got a consistent rhythm of sending emails, your email offer from a month ago that would solve their problem is probably “out of sight and out of mind.”

Email marketing doesn’t work if you’re not being intentionally consistent in sending them. A consistent email schedule helps to make sure you’re hitting the right people at the right time because you’re there when they’re ready.

They Can Provide Value to Your Audience

I’ll never forget an email I received from a mentor of mine that was talking about getting your finances figured out for your business in order to be successful. Yes, it was an automated email, but the information it provided was valuable to me. While that email was valuable to me, there may have been people who did not see value in that email. 

Not every email will provide value to every single person in your email list. That’s not the point of sending it. The point of sending it is to show you’re an expert in your field and that you know what you’re talking about. 

If you’re sending emails with the goal of providing value to every single person every single time, it might be time to rethink your email strategy. The goal is to give your audience the information and let THEM decide what is valuable. An easy way to see when you’re providing value is to see how many people opened it and if they clicked on any links provided in the email. 

Increased Brand Awareness

Email is a great way to help increase brand awareness with your audience because you’re showing up in their mailbox regularly. Brand awareness comes from consistently staying in front of your target audience. Sending a single email is not creating brand awareness. Sending 26 emails throughout a 12 month period is creating brand awareness. The goal in this is to help associate your company with a provided product or service, so when they are in need of that product or service, your company is the first thing they think of.

Inexpensive Investment with Solid ROI

ROI, or return on investment, is a key statistic for businesses when they look to spend money on advertising. ROI on email varies depending on your industry, but on average, according to Constant Contact, the average ROI is $36 per $1 spent on a campaign. While not all results will come with that large of a return, for most businesses, if you’re getting even $10-$15, think about how that would affect your revenue each year if you were getting $10-$15 back for every $1 you spent on email marketing campaigns. What could that help your business achieve this year?

It Builds Trust with your Audience

Similar to brand awareness, consistently sending emails to your audience helps build trust. This happens because they’re seeing the name of your business pop up in their inbox regularly. Email marketing is a fantastic way for small businesses to build trust and credibility because it’s an easy, low cost way to be consistent. Remember our first point of consistency wins?? Consistency builds trust. 

It Can Improve Sales

Earlier we talked about ROI, and getting money back from doing email marketing. How do we do that? SALES! Email marketing has the opportunity to drive sales opportunities from your database and push people who are on the fence towards buying. These opportunities for incremental sales can help add revenue to the business that may not already be there. 

Businesses who do a great job of using email to stay connected time their audience will use email to drive sales when sales are slow. Maybe there’s a historical pattern within your business that certain months are slower than others. During those months, use email marketing to offer incentives to purchase. While these emails can work anytime, overuse of them can diminish their effectiveness, and it’s important that these emails aren’t the only email they receive from you. Use email to build that relationship so it can eventually build sales.

As you can see, there are numerous reasons to use email marketing for your business. Whether your goal is to increase sales, increase brand awareness, or simply improve communication with your audience, email marketing has the capability to do it all.

If you’re looking for help with your email marketing, reach out to us at Hello@goldbear.media to start a conversation. We’re here to offer advice or even assist you in building your first campaign. 

Don’t buy the hype that email is dead. It’s not. Over 4.5 Billion people in the world have email, and that number is only going to increase. Take advantage of those addresses in your database. I promise you, there’s gold there!