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Why You Need Email Marketing as an Effective Digital Channel

Why You Need Email as an Effective Digital Channel
Why You Need Email as an Effective Digital Channel
Image Credit: Talha Khalil/Pixabay

Many businesses don’t consider email as an effective marketing channel. Yet, it remains one of the most effective and cost-efficient methods for businesses to connect with their target audience, build brand loyalty, and drive conversion. If you Google for email marketing stats, you will see some supporting figures.

  • HubSpot says the Return-on-Investment (RoI) for email marketing is $36 for every $1 spent.
  • MailChimp gives a break-down of different email marketing KPIs.
  • In its 2023 “B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends” report, Content Marketing Institute (CMI) shows that nearly three out of four marketers it surveyed use email newsletters to distribute content.
  • Other stats from Oberlo shows:
    • 81% of SMBs still rely on email as their primary customer acquisition channel, and 80% for retention (data from Emarsys, 2018).
    • Average email open rate is 20.81%, but with personalisation, the open rate increases by 50% (data from Yes Lifecycle Marketing, 2019).

Common Resistance Against Email Marketing

However, when it comes to email marketing, many small-to-medium-sized businesses don’t consider it as a channel worth pursuing. Some common resistance include:

  • It’s dead. B2B customers won’t read our email to make a decision.
  • We don’t have the budget for it.
  • It will end up in their spam folder. The rest will simply unsubscribe.
  • How do you measure success? Simply because someone is opening an email doesn’t mean they will read it.
  • We have run it before and didn’t have much traction.

Let’s talk about these points one by one.

Email Marketing Isn’t Dead

Email marketing is very much alive. Take Netflix for example. How do they tell you what’s coming to your screen next Friday, or when the second season of your favourite crime drama will stream? They send you an email every week. How do you keep updated with your favourite industry, fashion, food, or travel topic? Chances are, you signed up for a few newsletters.

So, it really depends on what you want from your emails. Most companies will pay for a marketing campaign as long as it helps some kind of conversion. While email marketing can be used for direct conversion (think about the times you looked at an unbeatable bargain for a holiday, a dinner, or cruise, and clicked on the link), you also need to remember who you are sending the email to, and for what purpose. For B2B prospects or customers, chances are, your cold email won’t go very far. That’s what sales pitches are there for. On the other hand, if you are an Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and want your subscribers to update to the latest software version because it offers some great new feature, there’s a higher probability of conversion.

Cost Can be Minimised

You can minimise email marketing costs in multiple ways, not least by integrating it with existing resources, collaterals, tools, and processes. Here are some examples:

  • The same graphics you are using for blog posts or printed collaterals can be reused for emails. The eBook or whitepaper you are promoting through a social media campaign can be the subject of the next email. Not all your email contacts may be following your company on social media. How do they know about the eBook if you don’t tell them?
  • You can create templated emails for different types of campaigns (for example, welcome emails, product or service update emails, special offer emails, outreach emails, or news update emails), and most of the content will be reusable, saving significant time.
  • Your CRM tool will most probably have an email automation facility. It will either be free or come with a relatively small price tag. It will be able to tap into your existing list of prospects, leads, and customers. Also, some of the well-known email automation tools come with a free plan for up to a certain number of emails per campaign. Unless you mind having a link back to their website from your emails (“Powered By” – in very small font), these can help you get started quickly.

You Can Spam-Proof Your Emails

The chances of your emails automatically ending up on your recipient’s spam folder depends on a few factors (this list isn’t exhaustive though):

  • The IP address or domain you are sending it from.
  • The subject line you are using.
  • The absence of an unsubscribe link.
  • The reputation of the links you are using in the email body.
  • The account you are using to send the email.

With careful planning, emails can be made not to end up in the user’s spam folder. This is one area many businesses don’t pay enough attention to. You can control some of these aspects using DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), Sender Policy Framework (SPF), and the cybersecurity-related measure: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance (DMARC).

Unsubscribe Is Not the End of It

Simply because someone has unsubscribed from your email list doesn’t mean you are doing something wrong. An unusually high unsubscribe rate should ring alarm bells of course, but people who have opted in for emails do that for a reason. Most unsubscription will happen for a few reasons:

  • Your recipients don’t know you. They have not opted in for your emails, or they have never heard from you. This often happens when you purchase email lists from third-party providers.
  • You are targeting the wrong people for the wrong campaigns. Think about it. If your CRM is not updated, you may not know that the CxO of a client has changed jobs. They may have awarded you business when they were working for an IT company, but now they are the CxO of a weight-loss program. Chances are, your emails about the latest software offer won’t be relevant to their job.
  • Your emails are too pushy, too salesy, and lack any empathy for the recipient.

Whatever the reason, if someone unsubscribes from your list, it’s actually good, because it gives you an opportunity to look at your campaign more critically, and your email list is one step closer towards becoming more targeted.

Measuring Success Depends on Defining Success

Measuring success in email campaign depends on what you define as “success”. Your email marketing campaigns (or the very reason of using email as a digital channel) should have clear objectives. What is that objective? Is it informing prospects and clients of the upcoming webinar and getting them to sign up? Is it following up a lead after someone has downloaded an eBook? Is it a welcome pack with links to more resources?

Most people see email campaign success through the lens of technical measurements like open rates, bounce rates, or click through rates. These figures are necessary, but you also have to remember, those technical KPIs will change with the objectives you set.

For example, when you want to measure the conversion of a webinar sign-up email campaign, the click through rate (CTR) shows the overall effectiveness of your email in getting people to interact with it. To get more value from this KPI, you can create a custom link with parameters to the webinar lading page and include that link in your email. Once users click on that link and go to the landing page, analytics tools like Google Analytics can accurately show the unique traffic coming from the email source.

To dig deeper, you can get a report from your email automation tool about the contacts who clicked on the link. You can then compare that list with the actual sign-up attendees and see how many email recipients actually signed up for the webinar after clicking the link.

Now, consider another use case where you want to inform people of an upcoming policy change. You will probably want to track only one KPI, the open rate, to measure its effectiveness.

Why Email Campaigns Fail

As the saying goes, “people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan.” Before writing off your past email marketing initiatives as ineffective, think about the reasons they may have failed. Ask yourself these questions:

  • How did you define success for the email campaign? Was your expectation realistic? How did you know the campaign was not successful?
  • Was the email list updated with the latest contact information?
  • Did you target the right audience for the right campaign? Did you segment the recipients?
  • Was your subject line poorly written, too pushy, salesy, or spammy?
  • Was there a lack of personalisation in your email subject, salutation, or email body?
  • Was your email designed poorly? Was it too cluttered with too much information?
  • Did it have a single and clear call to action (CTA)?
  • Did it open in browser correctly? Was it mobile-friendly?
  • Were you sending too many emails too frequently?
  • Were all the links in the email working properly?
  • Did you include unsubscribe links? Did you add other necessary links like your privacy policy or social media channels?
  • Did you use automation to ensure emails were sent on time, at the right time or season?
  • Did you try a variation of your email campaigns with A/B testing?

Chances are, when you consider these questions, you will find one or more reasons why your campaigns might have failed (or still failing). Once you address those issues, results should improve, often dramatically.

Final Words

Hopefully, this post has given you some food for thought about email marketing. So how do you get started, or bring your existing campaigns to frutition? To manage successful email marketing campaigns, the first thing businesses should do is create need is a strategy. In the next part of this article series, we will talk about questions you should consider when building that strategy.

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8 Best Practice Tips for Copyediting Your Own Writing

Image Courtesy: Daniel Thomas/Unsplash

In a perfect world, we would all have a professional editor always available to ensure our written work was top-notch. We would write the article, not care about grammar, spelling, or punctuation and expect our authors are smart enough to understand the thought process that went into creating the great piece of work. If it weren’t good enough, the editor would handle the rest.

And why not? With clients, publications, and agencies increasingly becoming tough on quality, it’s hard to submit an article, eBook, or whitepaper without some sort of editing going into it. But tighter budgets and punishing deadlines also mean that in most cases, there will be no one available to edit your work to make it look good. In fact, you are expected to edit your work before you submit the first draft.

And you better get used to this. There’s nothing worse than the gut-sinking feeling of spotting an error in something you’ve written just after you’ve hit the publish button or have emailed a document to an entire mailing list. 

Check out our simple tips to ensure your writing is polished, professional, and fit for purpose.

Copyediting and Proofreading: What’s the Difference?

You’ve probably heard the terms copyediting and proofreading used interchangeably. In a nutshell, there are two distinct levels of revising written work. Copyediting looks at the big picture, while proofreading takes care of cosmetic edits. Both are essential parts of the revision process.

Proofreading should be the final phase of editing before you hit “submit”. It’s where you tidy up spelling, grammar, punctuation, inconsistent capitalization, and style-related errors. Think of it as the final polish.

But before proofreading, you need to do a thorough copyedit. This is a substantial review of your text and is best undertaken once the draft is complete. It’s where you revise your work to make it better, crafting it into something that shines.

Why? Because what you think you’ve written and what was actually written can be very different. When you put yourself in your readers’ shoes, you will often cringe at the quality of your work. That’s why copyediting often results in rewriting entire paragraphs of texts to improve overall consistency, structure, storytelling style, and flow of information. It also often means rearranging or shortening sentences, reorganizing sections, or elaborating on something you only touched upon. In short, copyediting can see you make significant structural changes to your written work.

The Value of Editing Your Work

Once you’ve put all your thoughts into a written form, sticking to a few simple copyediting rules can make a world of difference.

Copyediting ensures your next email, website copy, blog post, or whitepaper reads like the work of a professional. The aim is to produce a structurally sound document that flows well, avoids ambiguity, and includes all the information the reader needs. If your written work is ambiguous, untidy, or unclear, your readers will treat it accordingly. And worse still, your readers won’t probably read your next piece, and your editors or clients won’t give you further work either.

Importantly, copyediting gives you the best chance of ensuring your document doesn’t contain embarrassing mistakes. A thorough copyedit can catch the flaws in your writing before they’re shared with a wider readership. Sometimes editors and publishers will do final proofreading before publishing, but they may expect you to do the copyediting yourself. It’s not the proofreader’s task to tell you that you repeated the same concept twice within the article or that the conclusion to your story was abrupt.

Also, when you edit your writing, you will learn new things. A classic example is when you must keep your piece within a specific word count. Forced to comply with such restrictions, you will learn how to present your ideas succinctly.

Our Best Practice Tips for Copyediting

Now that you know what copyediting is and why you need to do it, here are some best practice tips.

Tip 1: Take a Break

You may have spent weeks writing your e-Book or several days composing an email newsletter. You have thoroughly researched your topic, repeatedly referenced your notes, made sure you have addressed all the submission requirements and even asked friends or family members to read your work. Everyone agrees it’s a great job. Now you have to do the editing.

Our advice? Take a break. Even when you are under a tight schedule, give it at least a good night’s sleep time and come back fresh.

Why? Because when you have spent a long time writing, you will be highly familiar with your work and be less likely to spot omissions, errors, or repetition.

Tip 2: Keep the Outline Handy

You should start copyediting your written work by checking if it covers everything it’s supposed to cover. One of the ways to check that is by comparing the written piece with the outline.

An outline is a bullet point list of what your written work should cover and how it should cover it. It gives an overview of the sections, subsections, and the depth they should go into. If you are not in the habit of creating an outline before you start writing, we highly recommend you do so from now on. Not only does it help you write the actual piece quickly, but the comparison also helps ensure you haven’t left any vital piece of information.

Tip 3: State your Goal Explicitly

It’s easy to assume that once your audience starts reading, they will automatically identify its aim and what you are trying to say. This is seldom the case. Your article’s introduction should clearly state the problem, why the reader should read on to find the answer, and what you will cover to give them the answer. Unless you’ve clearly stated these points upfront, it’s unlikely your readers will be motivated to read on. This is where your subject line, title, and opening paragraph can make a huge impact. You can use catchy or engaging wording to engage your readers early. If you are writing a multi-part series, briefly mention what the reader learned in the last installment and what they will learn today.  

Tip 4: Check the Document Structure

You should map a clear path for your “story” and ensure you adhere to it. Each piece of writing should have a clear structure with a beginning (introduction), a middle (the body), and an end (conclusion).

We talked about the introduction briefly. The document’s body should present the story’s central theme in a logical, easy-to-follow path. In other words, there should not be any abrupt jumps from one concept or event to the next. If you expect the reader to be familiar with something, don’t just assume it. State such assumptions where necessary. If you are writing an essay or a blog and you don’t want to want extraneous information, make a reference to an external link. Your readers will appreciate this.

Finally, the conclusion should be where your readers will make their own decision. You can state what the reader has learned or what the story has covered and give direction for where to go. It could be a simple call to action for signing up for the newsletter, an invitation to an event, or a prompt to check out other written works from you. It could even be a simple message for the reader to contemplate on.

Tip 5: Remember Your Audience

Even though you have put your heart and soul into your writing, remember that you are writing for your readers. Keep your audience’s level of understanding and time in mind. If your writing is for new mums about their newborns, you will want to use a compassionate voice and keep your message clear and short. Why? Because typically, they will have a short time available for reading and will be looking for relevant information only. Being overly patronizing or using medical jargon (unless you explain) won’t help here. If you are writing about the latest multi-player games, you must remember that your readers are tech-savvy and want to learn something new. Using a sales pitch won’t resonate with them. As you read through your work, ask yourself how each piece of information you provide will benefit your readers and if it should be there.

Tip 6: Don’t Repeat Yourself

When passionate about a topic, we often stress the same point more than once. However, your readers will appreciate brevity and clarity. If you have stated an opinion or fact once, leave it there: no reason to state it differently or say, “as we have said before”. If your text contains waffle words that don’t serve a purpose or make a point, take them out. Getting rid of repetition saves valuable time for the readers and allows you to add more relevant information.

Tip 7: Use Simple Sentences

In the same way that we find it easy to switch off when people talk in a monotone, readers will also quickly move away when they are not engaged. Try varying the length of your sentences. You may need to combine some sentences or shorten others. Similarly, don’t use convoluted sentences that go nowhere. As we showed in another blog post, writing in plain language makes reading much easier. This means you will have to break down complex sentences, use less jargon, and be concise. Similarly, paragraphs can be reordered to flow more smoothly, and text can be shuffled around. Use tools like Grammarly or Hemmingway, and look up synonyms where necessary.

Tip 8: Don’t Cram Everything in One Place

Some subjects can be quite lengthy to explain. Don’t try to tell the story in one piece if there’s too much information to fit in. For example, anything above 1500 words for blog posts will usually see readers losing interest or moving away. Break down your story into a multi-part series and create logical links between them so readers can follow through. What you leave out can be as important as what you leave in.

Final Words

Copyediting is the first line of defense against mediocre writing. It’s worth investing your time and effort – you’ll be rewarded with clear, concise, and compelling words that people want to read, and your readers will thank you for that.

If you liked this article, you can contact us for your corporate content marketing needs.

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