Email is Here to Stay

In a recent article “For E-Mail Newsletters, a Death Greatly Exaggerated”, the New York Times said “Email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march.” Newsletters may seem old-school to some and email may seem archaic compared to social media marketing, however, email is still the preferred method of commercial communications by 74% of all online adults, according to a recent survey by Merkle. And newsletters continue to be a great way to communicate consistently with your customers. Company newsletters and email campaigns boost sales, after all, these customers have already signaled their interest in what you’re offering by providing their email address and opting in to receive your content. If well written and targeted correctly, email marketing messages can deliver the right content to your prospects at precisely the right time, resulting in high response rates from quality prospects.

But the key to a successful email/newsletter campaign is that the email gets opened and the newsletter is read. Some ways to make your newsletter most effective include the following:

• A clean design that is smartphone friendly – each element should be easy to find. 64% of key decision makers are viewing email on their mobile devices, according to MailerMailer’s E-mail Marketing Metrics Report, so make sure your content is easily viewed on such devices.
• Many people read email with graphics turned off so your design should take that into consideration. According to a recent MarketingSherpa survey, only 33% of those surveyed have images enabled in their email provider.
• Grab their attention in the subject line. Find a concise phrase that highlights the most important information in the newsletters.
• Include valuable contents. Customers need a good reason to add more email to their already overflowing in-boxes, so make your newsletter valuable by providing content that is relevant to your reader.
• Timing is everything. Would you read a newsletter late on a Friday afternoon? Probably not, so you can guess that this is not the best time to send yours out. In order to determine the best time for you to send experiment with sending your newsletter on different days and times, then analyze your click through rates to see when the most effective time is for you.
• Be careful how frequently you email. If you email too frequently you might be considered a spammer, however if you email too infrequently customers may become less likely to remember your brand. Once or twice a month is a good rule of thumb for most companies.
• Provide expert information, industry news, and other content that your customers will be interested in so they will look forward to receiving your email and want to open and read it every time it arrives.
• Use a clean, up-do-date mailing list.
• Make sure the email is easy to act on by placing your call to action at the top of the message where the reader is mostly likely to see it.
• Avoid JavaScript or external CSS because every email client interprets the code differently. The vast majority of mail programs will not load your style in the way that it was originally intended.

73% of marketers agree that email marketing is core to their business and 60% claim that email is a critical enabler of products and services. 20% of marketers say that their business’ primary revenue source is directly linked to email operations and 43% of businesses have email teams of 2-3 people. 74% of marketers believe email produces or will produce ROI in the future and for 69.7% of U.S. internet users, email is the preferred method of communication with businesses. (pardot.com). These are just a few statistics that support the fact that email really is here to stay.

Bullets

• App marketers are employing push more and more to deliver important or interesting information, with good reason, as 52% of people opt-in for push messages. (loyalitics.com)

• Browsing for coupons is the second most popular digital activity for U.S. grocery shoppers. (marketingprofs.com)

• U.S. adults will spend more than 5-and-a-half hours per day with digital media this year, up by almost a half-hour year-over-year, per eMarketer’s latest estimates. The majority (2:51) of that time will be spent with the mobile internet, which will have seen a compound annual growth rate of 37.2% between 2011 and 2015. (marketingcharts.com)

• According to January 2015 research by Advertiser Perceptions, U.S. media sellers allocated nearly 40% of their programmatic ad inventory to mobile. (emarketer.com)

• 57% of consumers are more likely to pay attention to companies if they are contacted at the right time and in the right context, and 52% of consumers expect businesses to know when this time is. (marketing2v.com)