Over the next three blog posts we’re going to look at whether or not email marketing is worth doing locally (spoiler alert: that’s a resounding yes from us), how to ensure your email content is valuable, and how to make email marketing work for you.
I’ll let you in on a little Systemato secret – much like pineapple on pizza, email marketing is a divisive topic for our team. We certainly believe in the merits of email marketing – at the most basic level, regular newsletters give you a chance to get in touch with your audience directly, and also allow you to give them access to exclusive content and offers which you may not want to share on social media for the masses.
But as we all know, numbers for email engagement tend to be low, which can be disheartening, and so often leads us to the question: ‘is email marketing worthwhile?’
Let’s get down to brass tacks, shall we? Email marketing is a way to reach out to the people who are subscribed to your mailing list, but how is that any different from people following you on social media? It’s not really, except for one crucial point; email marketing gives you direct access to the user’s inbox.
So, first things first. The Systemato team likes to indulge in some self-reflection from time to time, so we implore you to do the same. How many newsletters are you subscribed to that you never bother reading? Probably a couple dozen, right? How many of them do you delete straight away? I’m guessing, most of them. But there’s probably one or two that you do stop to read when your inbox goes ping!
We just spoke about low engagement numbers – whether your open-rates are low (the number of people who are opening your email) or you just can’t get users to actively engage with your content and click on the links in your emails, all we can say is don’t lose heart. Yes, increased engagement is definitely a goal in email marketing but it is not the be all and end all.
Investing time and energy in email marketing can feel a little trite considering how long it’s been around for and just how oversaturated it can be. It’s important to keep your eye on the prize, the pineapple slice. Don’t forget, email marketing is there to help you reach a very particular subset of your audience. I think we can all agree that social media can be overwhelming, with newsfeeds that are so jam-packed that they require filtering. However, while filtering on social media can be quite flexible, filtering on email can be a lot more cutthroat via unsubscribing.
Let’s break it down.
Wide reach is important, mostly because you want probability on your side. Let’s say a newsletter that’s been sent out to a list of 6000 subscribers was opened by 50% of its recipients but there’s only get a click-through rate of 5%. A 5% click-through rate based on a 50% open-rate sounds pretty dismal, doesn’t it? Not so, mon ami! Your handiwork has succeeded in a) getting half of your subscribers to look at your email, b) 150 people to click-through on a CTA, thus getting those users to your website or landing page.
The most important thing is that one of those clicks gets you a lead. It might not be immediate, it might not happen over the course of one email – so long as it happens. One lead will more than compensate for the time you’ve spent putting one newsletter together.
So, there you have it! Email marketing can work – you just have to work a little harder at getting people to engage. And that’s really the key to email marketing.
Your next question may be ‘how do you get people to engage?’
Stay tuned, we get into that in Part 2 of this series.
