It comes as no surprise that the average person checks email more frequently than their physical mailbox. Makes sense – email offers a convenient, comfortable, and cost-effective communication platform. Incidentally, the number of email users is growing each year.
According to a Statista report, email marketing revenue in 2024 topped $9.5 billion. But the most stunning fact about email marketing is its massive Return on Investment. The ROI of email marketing eclipses that of other channels by a long stretch.
Email marketing campaigns are subject to rigorous analytical assessments. Fortunately, such testing is entirely possible. It’s thanks to all the digital mapping systems currently available to marketing departments. Every metric is quantifiable.
Among the most popular measurable performance criteria are open rates (ORs), conversion rates (CRs), and click-through rates (CTRs). Many professionals are streamlining their digital communications through various automated features. These can measure user data and optimize campaign performance.
The majority of marketing professionals prefer email as the most reliable marketing automation platform. It eclipses social media management and content management systems.
Email offers a personalized marketing message to users – something sorely lacking with dedicated social media platforms. This type of brand messaging service delivers a consistently excellent customer experience.
The inclusion of AI (artificial intelligence) systems into email marketing platforms has proven to be game-changing. AI is constantly evolving – a dynamic global ecosystem that learns and improves with every iteration – thereby facilitating higher levels of professionalism than ever before. AI automates routine features and functions while enhancing content quality across multimedia channels.
Challenges Facing Email Marketing Efforts
If we step off the academic platform for a moment and consider the challenges facing email marketing efforts logically, a few ideas come to mind.
For starters, how does a company build a reliable email list of potential or existing customers? That's the most essential criterion to consider. An email marketing campaign requires accurate, reliable, and targeted messaging. Companies need to know all the information up front.
There's no point having a list of names if half of them are decommissioned and the other half aren't interested in the company's products or services.
Fortunately, this challenge has a failsafe set of solutions. Websites are wonderful creations when they're built properly. They allow businesses to track, with pinpoint precision, every action taken by a potential or actual customer. Every step of the process is trackable with clearly defined metrics on engagement and activity.
When a user browses a website, cookies track customer movements. These are like breadcrumbs that analytics use to measure the effectiveness of every component of a website. Every user has an IP address. If the user is logged in with the username/password, even more information is available to marketing management.
The best way to get email addresses is to offer customers subscription options. Coupons, discounts, special offers, exclusive deals, limited-time promotions, and the like are the perfect hook to get users to volunteer their personal information for effective email marketing.
But that's only half the problem. The other challenge rests with the email platform on the customer's end.
A business may send a bunch of marketing emails to a customer, but the customer's email service may redirect all of those emails to the spam folder, a.k.a. junk mail. That's a big challenge, which is why solicited emails must be sent rather than unsolicited ones. Once a customer receives an email from a company with a promotional offer or exclusive deal, the customer validates the sender, and the email service no longer flags it as spam.
This brings us to an equally important component of the email marketing conundrum: marketing messages must be expertly crafted to achieve their pre-set objectives. Spam messaging, poor-quality email content, or irrelevant marketing often falls flat.
Customers only want to read tailored email marketing messages. Nobody wants generic content, clogging up their inbox. It doesn't matter if they like the brand or not; people want to see things that they're interested in.
For example, if the customer browses blouses at Company ABC, it makes sense for the marketing message to include blouses or other accoutrements and haute couture that may interest the customer. Relevance, timeliness, convenience, cost-effectiveness, and personalized messaging always win the day.
How To Ensure Email Marketing Works for Your Company?
If you've made it this far, you already know the answers to this question. But for folks who glossed over the material, it's worth reiterating. The right message needs to be sent to the right customer at the right time to achieve the desired objective. It seems like marketing professionals are constantly walking on eggshells, but they're not.
Fortunately, marketing is arguably the most studied management discipline. There are many tried-and-tested techniques to facilitate effective email marketing campaigns. Ideation and creation go hand-in-hand. If you have an email address for a potential customer and products or services they may be interested in, you can close the deal with an effective email marketing campaign.