Did you know that email marketing provides an average ROI of $44 for every $1 spent?

Why is email marketing so effective? Because it allows businesses to quickly and efficiently send personalized marketing materials to specific audiences. 83% of B2B marketers are leveraging email marketing campaigns to generate new business opportunities

Marketing through email can be a fast, flexible and cost-effective way of reaching new customers and retaining existing customers.

Filtering Your Email Marketing in 2018

Now we discuss how email marketing will be essential for your company in 2018. Let’s run through a few things you can do to improve your email campaigns this year.

Targeted Marketing Opportunities

Unlike many other marketing opportunities, when properly implemented, email marketing can provide your business with various ways to target specific customers. To do this, make sure that your email marketing software allows for lead scoring. Once a user fulfilled the criteria you have defined, then follow up them with targeted messaging to drive the funnel.

For example, let’s say that you send out an email that contains information on a sale. You have also set up lead scoring to know who has bought something as a result of this email and someone who has not. Your email marketing software follows up automatically with an email (possibly a discount code) to entice them for purchase.

For those that did purchase, they could be placed into an email campaign that could provide tips and tricks on how to use the product they just purchased. Perhaps, if the product they purchased has a steep learning curve, you could offer a series of emails that are essentially an onboarding process.

More Personal and Targeted than Social Media

While there are many benefits of using social media for your business, there are many of your customers who might not use social media. However, these people more than likely have an email address.

There are numerous ways to capture a customer’s email address. A few ways are having a form on your website, asking them during the account creation or checkout process, or even asking them during a phone call. Pair their email address up with a first and last name and you have the foundation set for sending personalized emails, meaning you could dynamically insert their information within emails or subject lines.

Once you have the basic contact information from a customer, you can implement progressive profiling to gather more information.  No matter what you ask, keep it short in length and questions. The user submits the form, they get the ebook they wanted, you get the info you needed.

Just think of the ways you can use this additional info to provide targeted and personalized messaging to your customer database. Once you have gained additional information, you could put certain users into new nurturing campaigns to continue the email marketing relationship.

Data-Driven & Measurable

Knowing what works and what doesn’t is key to the success and improvement of a marketing campaign. With email marketing, you get insights into your initiatives.

Insight into a metric like open rates which is what percent of users who actually opened the email you sent. One key factor in improving open rates is having an intriguing subject line. Creating eye-catching subject line results in higher open rates.

Another metric your business can track is (CTR), which is essentially what percent people clicked on a link within the email. If you are really doing email marketing right, you should split test different calls to actions (CTA) within your email copy (and even subject lines). Knowing if one particular phrasing works better than others in generating click-through, can provide exponential results to your campaign.

Having access to these metrics help your business keep tabs on what is or not working in your email marketing initiatives.

Permission to Contact Prospects & Clients

Let’s face it, it is much easier to see results by contacting those who want to hear from you. This is done very easily in email marketing by confirming their email address after submission business. This is called a “double opt-in”, meaning that not only did the user submit their email address, but they are confirming they did so by logging into their email and clicking on a verification link you send them.

By clicking this verification email, they are granting you permission to contact them via email.

Now that you have their permission, you must be conscious of how often you email them do n’t flood their inbox with your messages. Users will start to ignore your emails, or worse unsubscribe completely from your email list.

With permission to email, your business can do a number of things with email marketing. You can create nurturing campaigns, send them monthly newsletters, or use it for progressive profiling.

Stay Top of Mind

Email marketing allows your business to email the consumer whenever you want. While not every email needs to be a sales pitch, your contact with the customer should provide something of value to them. Whether this is a link to your latest blog post, an email asking them questions relating to your industry, or even an update on new products coming out in the near future; using email to stay connected to your customers keeps your brand in the forefront of their minds.

With the personalization of email, you can tailor your message to be warm and friendly. The personal touch will help them connect with your company on a personal level and not think you are just interested in having them buy something. This ultimately builds relationships, loyalty, and trust among your subscribers.

Generate Sales

Email marketing can be a channel to help you increase sales when implemented properly. I am not talking about blasting your list with sales pitch after sales pitch. That won’t work out too well. Your business needs to use email marketing the right way.

Through lead scoring, and well-defined email campaigns, a business can know when a customer is primed for a purchase. Knowing where your customer is in the funnel through lead scoring will give you insights on when to be more aggressive with sales based messaging.

Being able to lead the customer further down the funnel on their own terms is a powerful tool. By allowing them to exhibit certain actions before hitting them up for a sale will not only make your customer happy but your bottom line as well.

Cost Effective & Affordable

The costs of email marketing can be much lower than many other forms of marketing. There are no advertising fees, printing or media space costs. Sure there will be some initial implementation costs, but once the foundation is set, the ongoing maintenance cost is minimal compared to the return.

Real-Time Marketing

Through email marketing, you can connect with customers in real-time. Using automated triggers, such as website activity, recent purchase or shopping cart abandonment, you can reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place and with the right offer.