Email Marketing is like all of the many things we take for granted.
It’s one of the best things that ever happened to digital marketing, but it’s also often ignored for the “shiny object syndrome” -- the new social media channels that pop up all the time, growth hacks, and an endless array of apparently newer strategies.
This is now done to death, but email marketing boasts of an unbelievable 42% ROI (Return on Investment). Normally, this one should be enough. But we know it’s not enough to convince many businesses, so we’ll dig further into it.
Email marketing is truly powerful, result-oriented, and lends itself well to several aspects of digital marketing that make it indispensable.
Let’s see why:
You Truly Own The Channel
One single operational change, addition of a new feature, or changing how the search pages work (hello AI-driven search, notwithstanding several “animal-name” upgrades to search listings by Google) is enough to sound the death knell for several businesses.
This is not to mention social networks going belly up (remember Orkut? MySpace?).
Unlike Facebook (Meta), Twitter, YouTube, Google, and anything else you’d be willing to bet your money on, Email Marketing is one of the few digital marketing channels that you truly own and control.
In short, no one can take away your earned list of subscribers and customers from you. Embrace email marketing for this one reason alone.
Boost Customer loyalty & Customer Retention
When someone subscribes to your email marketing list, they are literally voting with their Inbox space.
They are letting you in.
They explicitly gave you consent to send them deals, discounts, more information, more inspiration, and to help them make informed decisions.
More importantly, they are letting you know that they like you and that they want to hear from you.
Email marketing is also a pillar for strong retention strategy for eCommerce businesses.
Healthy nurturing campaigns, powered by email marketing, can help you nurture and build on these relationships (at scale) and over time.
Just being in touch and giving your subscribers what they want is a low-friction, low-cost, and an easy way to help build and maintain customer loyalty.
Core Acquisition Marketing Strategy
The front-facing, lead-generating part of email marketing -- driven by regular pop-ups, slide-ins, embeddable forms, sticky bars, floating bars, sticky Call-to-action buttons, and exit-intent pop-ups -- makes for a no-nonsense, low-cost customer acquisition channel for your business (for eCommerce and for several other types of businesses).
Working 24/7 -- and smartly at that -- lead generation elements such as pop-ups hellp drive leads without you having to spend anything extra on paid advertising, SEO, social media, and so on.
Again, the lead generation elements are also in your control. Going from the global average of 2% (sitewide) to anything above that, your casual visitors can be instantly turned into lifelong customers (provided you do it right).
Create Events & Build Momentum around your Brand(s)
Behind-the-scenes, news, information about your products, upgrades to your services, special events, customer-centric events (such as anniversaries and birthdays) -- with so much happening around the clock, all days of the year, you’d never want to let your customers miss all this excitement.
Apart from all of the work that email marketing does for eCommerce, going back to school and using the good old “broadcasting” features that several email marketing platforms provide are still some of the best things you could do for your e-commerce brand.
Build excitement, create buzz, make an impact with email marketing.
Create events (and invite your customers along for the ride).
You’ll never go wrong with email marketing if you do it right (and for long enough for it to start making a difference).
Excited? Need inspiration? Sign up with Panoramata. Get new ideas and see what several hundreds of eCommerce brands are doing with their email marketing campaigns. Build inspiration lists. Learn from their campaigns, SMS campaigns, ads, and landing pages.
