Despite the emerging platforms and technologies, email remains one of the most powerful tools in marketing. And it’s easy to see why: virtually all people have an email address. Done the right way, email marketing can increase ROI, build a better customer experience and turn one-time customers into lifelong customers. After all, no company wants to remain in business for a couple of months, or a year.
Today, the digital landscape can change in the blink of an eye. New technologies emerge, hype grows and sometimes it’s easy to get carried away. After all, who doesn’t want to try a fancy piece of technology? Everybody is doing it, right? While new technologies can really be useful if used the right way, more often than not they cause you to lose your focus on what really matters. Sometimes, companies fall for the hype; they implement a technology they don’t understand. Even the most remarkable technology falls short if it used in the wrong way. Fortunately, there is one piece of communication technology that has stood the test of time, proving its worth time and time again: email.
You are probably familiar with the saying “email is king.” The saying may have become a cliché, but it is safe to say that it’s true. There’s a reason why companies and individuals alike keep using email as a primary means of communication: it works. While email may not be as fancy as social media channels like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, it does have some huge advantages over social media and other communication platforms. For one thing, almost everyone uses email. Social media is generally geared toward young people. Email is used by almost all demographics, thus giving companies a wider reach.
Email has been around for decades, but it has only gotten more sophisticated and easy to use with the passing of time. Today, companies use email to create innovative marketing campaigns, drive conversion rate, establish a personal relationship with their customers and deliver a better customer experience. Email marketing, unlike some other forms of marketing, is permission-based. For example, let’s say a potential customer visits your page and reads one or two articles about your product. If you want to send a newsletter about your product, offers and other news, you can invite the visitor to fill in their name and email address through a form. If the visitor enter his name and email address, you have ‘won’ the permission to send an email. The visitor wants to know more, he expects an email from your company. In fact, many customers opt for email as the primary form of communication with their favorite brands.
It isn’t enough, however, to simply devise and launch email marketing campaigns. They have to be personalized, they have to treat each potential customer a unique human being, with hugely personal needs and desires. Gone are the days when you could send hundreds or thousands emails, hoping someone would take an interest in what you have to say. That’s why permission-based marketing email is the way to go. If you can offer timely and personalized content to your target audience, you’re on the right to way to unlocking the key to customer success.
Personalized email marketing will not only help you gather new leads and turn them into loyal customers, but it can also help you build meaningful relationships with your existing customers. How can you do that? Well, there lots of ways. You can send birthday cards, offer discounts on certain products, links to download a free e-books that might be of interest to the customer, etc. These are just some of the examples of personalized email marketing. Email technology has gotten better and better over the years, but what makes personalized email marketing so powerful is related to rapid advances in marketing automation technology. Combined together, email and marketing automation tools can help you build personalized email marketing campaigns, respond to changes in consumer behavior in real time and deliver an amazing customer experience. The market is awash with marketing automation solutions, affordable even for every company- regardless of size and budget.
What is more, email marketing is cost-effective. Once again, it is highly effective when combined with marketing automation technologies. Imagine if you could get insight in the forms of reports about the performance of your email marketing campaigns. Or tinker with your messages. Or quickly respond to a change in consumer behavior. Customer Relationship Management(CRM) systems have turned these into a reality. In Flexie CRM, for example, you can run A/B tests to see which has the best results and which needs to be refined further.
You can also create custom reports about the performance of your email marketing campaigns.
Personalized email marketing is the future. Email may be an ‘old’ communication technology, but its worth has been proven time and time again. Used the right way, it can and will help you reach and exceed your goals.
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