Shocking as this may be, I didn’t send my first email until I was in college, which makes me think of the entire internet as a mere youth. Even so, email is “old” in online terms. Email marketing has been around as long as the internet itself and as an email marketing consultant I can tell you that it has come a long way, baby!
From the days of “You’ve Got Mail” and having to wait 15 minutes for anything to download, to the magic of grouping emails, to the speed increases that are mind boggling, to this incredible land of email marketing automation!
You hear people all the time thinking that email marketing is going out of vogue, but according to a recent report from Custora (see full blog post here) the statistics say that email is the second best way to acquire a customer online, right behind search engine results. Crazy, right?
Not only is it a great way to acquire a customer, but check this chart out. The percentage of customers acquired by email has grown in trend with the organic search and has actually quadrupled over the last four years! Dying they say? Read the statistics we reply!
So if email is still such a great way to get new customers, then selecting and using an automated email marketing system is likely a great move for your business, no matter what size you are. Email marketing consultants love automated email systems because they make it easier to create email campaigns that target your customers where they are. If you are using a full inbound marketing strategy then a fully integrated email system, such as a company like HubSpot offers, is a great way to keep everything in one place. That is especially helpful when it comes to reporting.
Segmentation really matters
Segmentation is a big word, but the basic premise is that your customers are all different so you can’t treat them the same. For example, knowing that a customer came to your website based on the adword “wireless router” you used is very different than a customer who came to your site based on the adword “laptop.” They have a different repeat likelihood, different profit on the order, and most likely a different customer lifetime value. Because they are different, running different email marketing campaigns to these customers can result in a much higher performance on your campaign.
While segmentation used to be manual and challenging, with the automated systems available now, this task has become much easier to manage. Understanding not only what a customer is buying, but how they are buying can help you succeed long term. We talk a lot about buyer personas in our world. A persona helps you understand not only what is being bought, but how a person is buying. Are they spontaneous, methodical, competitive, humanistic? How you market to each of these types of people impacts how they will respond to your email. Read this blog about the topic for more information.
As an email marketing consultant who has watched email evolve, I can tell you that segmentation and automation works and email isn’t old and dying at all – it’s only getting more mature.
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