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Does Email Marketing Still Work?

Does Email Marketing Still Work?

Written by enCOMPASS Agency

It’s easy to take email for granted. It’s become ubiquitous; we’re pretty much always synced to our inboxes, receiving new messages throughout the day via our desktops, mobiles, and even our smart watches. It’s not unusual for professionals to receive dozens, if not hundreds of emails each day, many of which are marketing emails and plenty of which are discarded without even being read.

All of this may seem to spell disaster for email marketing, which is by now a fairly seasoned approach: Lacking all of the flash of, say, Snapchat, email can seem a little bit tired, and it’s all too easy to assume that the marketing emails you send fall on deaf ears—ending up in spam folders rather than being read, much less engaged.

Why Email Marketing Isn’t Dead

But here is the paradox: Easy though it may be to assume email marketing has passed its prime, it’s actually doing quite well, and in fact it generates an ROI that most other marketing mediums can’t touch. As we’ve stated in the past, email marketing matters a lot more than you might think.

So how has email marketing remained aloft in an ever-tumultuous world? It can offer three things that make it uniquely effective:

Directness. You may send the same basic email to a thousand different people, but remember: Your customer only receives one email, and the communication feels very one-on-one and direct. By personalizing each message and employing targeted, segmented lists, you can communicate in a much more customer-specific way than you can with a public Facebook post or tweet.

Authenticity. By the same token, you can use email as a way to be really personal and candid with your recipients, perhaps writing a monthly newsletter or a weekly e-blast with quick thoughts from your CEO or your founder.

Measurable performance. Because email has a fairly short tail, it’s usually very easy to track what happens to a given email—whether it’s read, deleted, or simply ignored.

All of these attributes combined mean that, when done right, email marketing has the potential to be a game changer for your integrative marketing campaign; the question is, how do you do it right?

Finding Success with Email Marketing

That’s ultimately too big a question for a single blog post, and we recommend talking it over in greater detail with the enCOMPASS team. In the meantime, here are some tips to get started:

  • For your email marketing list to be effective, you need to have the permission of your recipients. You can’t get permission with a bought or rented list, so build your list through organic opt-in—and always give subscribers a place where they can opt out.
  • Focus on strong subject lines, which really do determine open rates; conveying immediate value, and keeping things relatively brief, is the way to go here.
  • Make sure your messages have a good balance of text and images—and not too much of either category. An important component in any message: The call to action.
  • Don’t do anything until you have protocols in place to track and measure your campaign.

Again, this is just the launch pad. To move forward with email marketing, we recommend contacting our team to develop a full strategy.

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