Why Your Digital Marketing Strategy Needs Effective Email Marketing

Coming up with a digital marketing strategy can be dizzying. There’s a lot of methods to choose from, like social media, content strategy, pay-per-click, influencer marketing, placement with prominent bloggers and ad networks just to name a few, and new methods seem to be created every other day. But there’s always email marketing, and it’s something that really shouldn’t be overlooked.

Email Marketing Isn’t Dying Anytime Soon

Everyone needs to check their email, even as more personal, business, and transactional communications are taking place on social media today. Your digital marketing plans need to include email marketing if you want loyal customers who will continually give you their money. Someone who gives you their email address is far more likely to give you their money than someone who gives you a Like and nothing else.

Email is Highly Curated Compared to Other Digital Marketing Methods

While having a social media presence is extremely important to growing your business, it’s a flash in the pan. It’s too easy for your links to disappear into the stratosphere after just 20 minutes, let alone several days later. Even if you use relevant hashtags that people are searching for, you only have a brief window of time before it gets ignored. While tweets and old Facebook posts never truly die, they still outlive their usefulness after a certain point (unless you’re famous to some degree then make a gaffe, and suddenly your old tweets and posts don’t stop getting attention.)

The ephemeral nature of pay-per-click ads makes this especially true. The ads stop helping you once your budget or the timeline runs out. Ads can make for an effective component of your overall digital marketing strategy, but pay-per-click shouldn’t be central to it. Unlike social media, traction on an ad doesn’t add to your community and a public display of how many people listen to what you have to say.

Email marketing on the other hand is far more curated than these other methods. Your message goes straight to the customer’s inbox, where you can curate exactly what you want to show in as many characters as you need. Better yet, your message is FIVE times more likely to be seen in an email than in a Facebook post. The customer is reading your email on their device of choice without the temptation to scroll through the mess of posts that will also hold their attention for about two seconds. Ads die eventually and social media posts get ignored after a certain point even if they never die; but if your email contained something useful or interesting? A customer WILL search their email trying to find that message you sent even if their inbox resembles an overgrown garden of weeds.

Ads, social media, organic search, and content can be the ways that you attract leads and nurture them. But email marketing is how you’re going to maintain them as customers and keep them interested in what you have to say and offer.

Email Marketing Builds More Trust

Search, social, and content strategies are important for getting noticed. But how do you get people to trust you?
Positioning is a major part of it, as is your branding. People aren’t going to trust someone with an amateurish-looking website to deliver world-class service. Press mentions and your overall online presence will help with your positioning. But email marketing is what will seal the deal between being perceived as unknown and a trusted resource.

While email marketing is just that– marketing through email– many people still perceive email marketing as being more trustworthy and less intrusive than social media posts and online ads. There’s a reason that people who give a company their email are more likely to be paying customers in the future if they aren’t already, and it’s because it’s a demonstration that they’ll pay attention to what you have to say. If your subscribers are clearly listening to you, that’s indicative of their trust in you which translates into loyalty. You want them to think of your company for their needs!
Subsequently, email marketing can’t have the same exact content as your blog, social media feeds, and so forth. There can be some overlap, but your emails need to demonstrate that you are giving your customers something special in return for trusting you. What kind of exclusive content can you give them through email? Are you offering discount codes only available through your mailing list and nowhere else?
Because of the mutual trust aspect being so dire, it’s no surprise that email marketing drives more conversions than any other channel (namely search and social media.) While you also can’t neglect search and social, one doesn’t place the trust in you that someone who hands over their email address does. The time commitment with social media and search is also so much more short-lived than being able to read an email at your own pace and without any interruptions from adware and other people posting.

Email marketing will persist because everyone still needs to use an email address, and the distractions that social media, online content, and organic search present are mitigated. Building and maintaining an email list and strategy should be one of your priorities when it comes to digital marketing.