Digital marketers have many avenues we can explore to promote products and services; whether we invest our time and resources into organic search & social platforms or pour our capital into paid search and display ads one thing is for certain – we are always at the mercy of someone else.

Using organic search and SEO requires us to skirt Google guidelines regarding algorithm manipulation, potentially incurring manual penalization or negative effects from algorithm updates. On the social side, to build a significant following you need to remain compliant with the ToS of whichever platform you are using, and if you are trying to grow over several platforms the effect is compounded.

For those among us that run paid search, or paid social; you must still bend the knee to meet the required guidelines set out by your provider – too many times have I seen successful marketers lose a significant revenue stream by having their Facebook Business Manager closed with barely an inclination as to why.

So, it’s time for a change. We need a more effective way to control our Marketing without having to worry about algorithm updates or ToS violations caused by unclear wording within the agreement.

If you weren’t collecting user emails from the time you launched your site, the best time to start is now and here’s why:

Everyone has an email address

Email addresses are so important to modern living, to subscribe to any digital service, make payments, or use social media – you need to have an email address. Because of this, over 50% of the world’s population is using email, that’s nearly 4billion people.

Having access to someone’s inbox provides a direct line of marketing and opens the doors for two-way communication with your userbase.

Significant ROI

One of the best reasons to begin Email Marketing is the fantastic return on investment for your campaigns. On average, for every $1 spent on an email campaign there is a return of $42.

As long as you are following email marketing best practices, and carefully planning out your campaigns – you are going to make money.

Personalise your message

Unlike other marketing tactics, email marketing allows us to personalize and highly target our campaigns through mail merging and list segmentation. Most email campaign management software allows for mail merging and personalisation fields so that you can quickly send thousands of personally addressed emails.

This leads to an increased open rate and brand trust with your audience.

By segmenting your list, you can conduct highly targeted marketing campaigns based on data provided by your users. You can collect data through surveys, sometimes contained within your welcome email – or through your users shopping habits.

For instance; you run an online music store selling instruments, you can collect data on the customers buying habits and segment them accordingly. If a user buys a violin from your store, you can segment them into a violin email list; this way you can retarget them with content relevant to their interests and increase your conversion rate.

Easily tracked and optimised

Email marketing metrics are easily tracked, you can check open rates, CTR, geolocation, and even what devices were used to view your email.

This data is useful as it means we can easily test, optimize, and retest our campaigns. For example; by sending out two email campaigns using the same copy, but making a slight adjustment to the subject line, we can measure if one performed better than the other.

We then optimize our next campaigns based on data gathered, ready to retest. This continual testing & optimization cycle can improve our marketing efforts exponentially in just a short amount of time.

Easy to scale

Scaling email marketing is simple – increase the size of your subscriber list. Now, while growing your subscriber list may provide a challenge, the actions taken to market to your audience are exactly the same.

If you grew your audience overnight by 1000%, it wouldn’t require any more work to market to them than it did the day before. This is in large part thanks to the many email marketing tools and software’s available that let us virtually automate the entire email marketing process.

Compared to other marketing tactics, and especially organic search, scaling an email marketing operation is a breeze.

If you aren’t currently leveraging inbox marketing in your campaigns, you really should. If anything, start collecting emails and building a subscriber list by adding a CTA & sign-up form to your site – even if you don’t intent to email market right away this will give you a head start when you do.

I hope you have found this post helpful and will consider introducing email into your marketing strategies going forward.

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