Email marketing is more effective than social media. Part 1.
Most business use social media and email to promote themselves. Both are useful, and you can get great results from either, but email is more effective.

Meet these seven challenges if you want to get the best from email marketing.

Social media has become a major player in online marketing as it’s so easy to build an audience and share information with your crowd. It helps you grow your brand publicly, and it’s satisfying when people like and share your posts, but ignore email marketing at your peril. Email has been around the block and it’s not going anywhere. In fact, it’s thriving.

At Wavelength Media, we recognise that marketing a business requires a holistic, integrated approach, that all activities should create a unified, consistent and seamless customer experience. Let’s consider how best to implement one of those activities; email marketing.

Increase engagement rates

Engaging with customers is essential. Customers remain loyal with the brands they trust. If companies understand who their customers are and what they care about, they can develop a plan that serves the type of content most relevant to their target customers.

According to customer service expert and author Micah Solomon, “successful customer engagement leads to loyalty, purchases, profits, and ambassadorship for your brand. Email marketing is one of the best marketing avenues brands can take in order to engage with customers in a personal way.”

Companies should identify who their current customers are and who their target customers are, then create personalised content for each and deliver it through email campaigns. Engaging with a customer through a welcome email, without following up with more relevant content, will not keep them engaged over the long-term – a long-term strategy is required. The longer a subscriber is engaged, the more educated they become about your business and the more likely they are to become a customer.

The goal is to send the right message to the right person at the right time.

Increase customer acquisition

Acquiring new customers is essential to the growth of any company. The larger your outreach, the more people you can influence, and the more revenue you can generate. When you want to grow your business, acquire new customers, launch a new product, offer a promotion, email marketing should be a large part of your marketing plans. Why? Because email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter.

The goal of customer acquisition is to do it at a reasonable cost and then convert them into long-lasting, repeat customers. They can also become your most loyal supporters. Getting new customers is often more expensive than retaining current ones, but it’s crucial to growth. One of the biggest challenges in acquiring new customers is understanding who your target audience is and then building your strategy accordingly.

Improve customer retention

Customer retention directly contributes to the overall revenue for your brand, and at a lower cost than customer acquisition. Therefore, it is important to retain your current customers, who in turn, can refer more customers and act as brand advocates. Customer loyalty leads to the stable growth of your business. The more you understand your audience, the easier to hang on to them and the healthier your business will be.

According to Jerry Jao, a leader in retention marketing, “One of the best ways to retain customers through email marketing is by creating unique content that is highly targeted and customised to their needs. Use email marketing to deliver customer satisfaction surveys and address issues in a totally timely manner.”

It’s now more likely your email will be opened on a mobile device than desktop. Your email should automatically be optimised to look just as god on an iPhone as it does in Outlook or Gmail or the hundreds of other devices and clients your subscribers are using.

To discuss marketing, drop us a line [email protected]

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