Can email marketing help companies increase sales?

At a business meeting recently, a colleague of mine asked me a great question, “Is email marketing still effective?”

The short answer is yes. Email marketing is very much a relevant marketing tool and can be a very useful and effective way to deliver your marketing content to your best target prospects for your business or organization. The goal being to convert the prospect into a customer with the effective use of words, stories, videos and information along their buyer’s journey.

The long answer though, is that the effectiveness really depends on several factors that go into a successful strategic email marketing campaign.

Typically, my marketing firm does not utilize the concept of “Email Blasts.” Email Blasts are an old-fashioned method of email marketing and are no longer very effective.

Today, we recommend building out segmented, lead nurturing email automation campaigns.

These types of campaigns are designed to continue the conversation with a “lead” that has been generated by an interested consumer coming through a landing page on a website.

The consumer may have found the landing page via a PPC digital ad, organic Google search result, social media ad, a print ad with a URL link, or a variety of other media channels.

Once the consumer “opts-in” to our sales funnel, that’s when the email automation takes over and the real work begins.

Some key components of an effective email marketing campaign include:

— having a plan (strategy)

— developing well-performing subject lines

— personalization

— database segmentation

— data-driven if/then scenarios

— Metric analysis

— Marketing automation email system such as HubSpot

— Video (a personal favorite tactic of mine!)

Once a campaign is initiated, measuring benchmarks such as open rate (20-25% typically is a good open rate benchmark — depending on your industry), average click rate (2-3% typically is a good click-through benchmark — depending on your industry), hard bounce rate and unsubscribe rate all can be tracked with each email that is sent.

That data can be used to evaluate the relative efficiency of the campaign. Based on the data collected per email incident, best-practices can be documented and the messaging, call-to-action and other intents of the email can be refined, tweaked and improved upon. In essence, you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work.

As you can see, email can be very effective to continue to nurture the valuable consumer leads you have in your marketing funnel. It’s not easy and certainly takes careful planning. But email marketing works!

As I continue on my mission to help people with their marketing and advertising across the Mountain State, I want to thank you for reading. If you have questions on this topic, I’d love to talk to you. Please email me: [email protected]

Until next time…

Jim Matuga is the founder and President of InnerAction Media, a marketing agency in Morgantown, WV. His new book available on AMAZON — Marketing Matters was inspired by his regular column here in the State Journal. You can listen to his weekly podcast “Positively West Virginia” on iTunes, Spotify and Google Play. He has extensive experience in leadership positions with West Virginia media companies, including newspapers, TV, cable, direct mail, radio, agency and digital.