Getting prospects from “generally interested in your brand” to “enthusiastic customers and evangelists” often requires a personal touch and some hand-holding. Email marketing is one of the best (and easiest) ways to accomplish just that.
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This is actually an even shorter definition, but you can sum up email marketing with another E word: Essential.
Okay, now the longer inbound marketing definition. If you’ve ever queued up an Outlook email to send a client an article you think they might be interested in, you have engaged in email marketing. If you’ve set up an email workflow that maps content-based messages to every lead in your database for the next calendar year, you probably don’t need to read this.
You shouldn’t live without email as a tool, given its huge potential for lead generation. Sure, social media interactions can lead to engagement and to website clicks, and smartly-tailored websites can funnel visitors to the places where you want them to take action, but as a pure lead generation tool, you can’t beat email for its combination of targeted messaging, personalization options, ability to drive clicks to a landing page, and (assuming you’re not a spam lord) deliverability. As useful as content and advertising is, knowing exactly who you’re going to reach isn’t possible unless you’ve got email addresses to deliver it directly to. Or if you’re a wizard, we guess.
Of course, it’s not as simple as typing in a subject line and blasting your 10,000-person strong list with a message that says “Learn moar click here.”
Why email marketing is important to marketers
Simply put, email is one of the most efficient and powerful means you have of communicating with prospects. The Direct Marketing Association has it offering an average ROI of 4,300%. As we mentioned above, though, email marketing isn’t necessarily easy to master.
Because so many companies have successful email marketing stories, your company will expect your efforts to be a net positive. That’s simply not possible without a marketing team (or solo marketer) worth its salt who maintains clean lists of email addresses, comes up with the content that fuels campaigns, and successfully tests and launches the actual campaigns. As one of our marketing mentors likes to say, anyone can send an email campaign, but very few marketers send good ones.
Follow best practices, segment your list smartly, and ensure both your messaging and your conversion path are on point. That means you’re delivering valuable and eye-catching emails to your prospects’ inboxes, and you’ll be rewarded with leads and new customers.
If you skimmed this post…
You probably have dabbled in email marketing at some point. To be clear, it’s any marketing in which you utilize email to reach contacts, leads, and clients with messaging. And hey, why don’t you scroll up and maybe learn something?
