Mediaboss Marketing

When it comes to brand messaging and audience engagement, social media gets all the attention nowadays, but thats just because its still relatively new. Study after study continues to demonstrate that email is the number one inbound marketing channel for keeping people thinking about you, clicking on your links and buying your products. The Direct Marketing Association in the UK found that over the course of 2013, email yielded revenues totaling 25 times the expenses associated with sending it, which is 16% higher than emails ROI the previous year.

This is why smarter digital marketers favor email even with everyone so excited about the power of Snapchat. And its growing. Business email traffic now accounts for some 100 billion messages every single day.

On the other hand, emails maturity as a digital marketing channel means that many are using it in outdated ways, or failing to make the most of the newer opportunities that email affords us. The go-to uses for email marketing keeping subscribers in the loop regarding your latest sales promotions, product rollouts, and newly published content are as relevant as ever, but if you arent doing more than that, then youre leaving money on the table. Here are three key email marketing goals that are within your reach and are worthy of your attention.

Top contemporary marketers know digital channels are great for tracking audience behavior to learn more about them. What does your audience care about? What types of content and offers turn them on? What are the best timings and frequency increments for reaching out to them?

In the age of big data, the answers are out there, helping us to build more complete and precise buyer personas and to refine our content strategies, for all channels, with agility. Its just a matter of looking for the signals in the right places social metrics, search data, and email clicks. Here again, social media provides heaps of insights, but best-in-class marketers recognize that there are some key advantages to using email for listening too.

Social-based reputation monitoring tools and analytics platforms are constantly improving, but theyre still not on the level where theyll give you a comprehensive picture of conversation volume or sentiment. No matter what dashboard youre on, youre still only seeing a fraction of the general publics conversations that matter to you. The majority of Facebook activity is private, and the other social networks yes, even the mighty Twitter dont have the mammoth adoption rates that Facebook enjoys, which is especially true if your brand targets baby boomers.

And besides, social engagement is by nature a real-time thing. If you post when your audience isnt looking, then youll have no way of knowing whether they might have been interested. Email, on the other hand, is asynchronous. Send an email when people are away from their connected devices, and your message will still be in their inboxes, waiting for them to hopefully look at when theyre ready.

So shake things up with your emails. Test different send timings, subject lines, images, tone of voice, calls-to-action, layouts, and subject matter. Do you get more responses when you write about whats new with your product line and include a coupon code, or when you offer light-hearted but lengthy commentary on industry trends? There are some potent automated tools out there for A/B testing these things, but you can do this all yourself manually too.

Arguably even more powerful, though, is making your email marketing into a two-way channel. Ask subscribers what their thoughts are, encourage them to hit the reply button, and you may be shocked by how helpful the responses are.

Content marketing is about building and strengthening relationships by being helpful and generous. If you want your audience to do more business with you, then you need to earn their trust and respect over time with ongoing messaging.

Read the original here:
3 Email Marketing Goals You Should Stop Ignoring