Email Marketing: the most powerful digital marketing tool

Email marketing has gotten a pretty bad rap in the last few years and for good reason! Everyone with an inbox has dealt with the endless flow of irrelevant and irritating spam. We bulk delete messages without much hesitation and expect email clients to intercept and redirect spam to junk mail folders.

Despite all this, digital marketers still go to many lengths to acquire a site visitor’s email address. We invest in automation services, we put valuable, sought after content behind optin forms, we spend precious time building newsletters. Getting a visitors email even has a special title! We refer to is as converting, because it is the moment the visitor converts to a lead and begins their buyer journey.

Why do we do all this when truthfully marketing and promotion emails have an abysmal open rate and an even lower click through rate? Because after all these years and all of these advancements, email marketing is the best tool for lead nurturing!

Use it, don’t abuse it

Email marketing, when executed properly and not abused, is one of the most powerful digital marketing tools businesses have at their disposal. It builds trust with potential customers, without pressuring them to buy. It waits patiently in their inbox until they decide to move forward on their buyer journey, and doesn’t take up the time of sales staff.

Let’s walk through an example of a perfectly run email marketing campaign. Pretend you are a digital marketing agency. You’ve created some really great content, promoted it on social media and made it available on your website. The content is funneling traffic from social media to your website.

One visitor, let’s call them Ms. Business Owner, arrives at your website. She is interested in learning how to use email marketing to help her small business grow. She reads a couple related blog posts then comes to an ebook offer, The Complete Manual to Email Marketing for Small Businesses. This is exactly what Ms. Business Owner has been looking for, and best of all the ebook is completely FREE! She need only provide her email, answer a few other questions and the ebook will be delivered to her inbox.

Ms. Business Owner gladly fills out the form, gets the ebook and dives in. She has converted from visitor to lead! But this is just the beginning of your email marketing campaign. Now your automation service takes over. The questions Ms Business Owner answered on the optin form have entered her contact into a list or segment that will receive personalized email messages specific to her needs. Maybe one question asked approximately how much her business earned last year, or how many employees she has. She would receive an email with content that would be relevant to businesses of that size, while an owner of a larger business would receive different emails.

Because you’re a digital marketing whiz you know not to overwhelm Ms. Business Owner with low-value emails every single day. On a weekly basis, when you’ve created some really great content, that you know would benefit her, you send an email promoting the free content, and reminding her you’re here to help.

This process is called lead nurturing and at the early stages of lead nurturing there is no better tool to use than emails. It doesn’t waste salespeople’s time, chasing leads that will never become customers and it doesn’t put pressure on the lead to buy.

Marketing gold

There is another great benefit to email marketing. Once someone offers you their email, you own it. What does this mean? Well, let’s compare it to social media or SEO. If Facebook or Google decided to radically change their algorithm or policy overnight all your investments in these areas could be erased. Email on the other hand, isn’t going anywhere.

Of course, like all digital marketing strategies, email marketing doesn’t succeed on its own. You need to have quality content to offer. Social media to promote the content. SEO to make sure your website is found.

takecareofmysite.com offers packaged services that address digital marketing as a whole and can be tailored to suit any business’s needs and budget.

Contact us today to learn which packages would best suit you.