With all the digital clutter today, it seems logical to assume email’s popularity as a preferred marketing channel has slipped dramatically. It hasn’t. To this day, email marketing packs an impressive punch.
According to Statista’s latest survey: “During a 2022 survey carried out among consumers from the United States, 34 percent had stated they would prefer brands to contact them via social media, while over twice that many named email as a channel brands should reach out to them with.”
Given the wide range of options, choosing the right communication channel to target and impact your audience is critical as it helps determine the success of your efforts. So, how can email marketing fuel your overall inbound strategy? In our in-house research building predictive channel preference models, we found that email is a top choice among an extensive array of consumers.
What are the benefits of selecting email marketing, and how does it impact your customers? Let’s dive into this channel preference overview to analyze the pros and cons.
Damn The Torpedoes
Email is a highly effective channel when targeted to the correct recipients. It can also be extremely economical at an average cost of $0.015 per email. The key is to correctly define receptive audience(s), determine the best cadence of contacts, and offer the right products, services, and solutions at convenient prices.
How do you do that? To know AnalyticsIQ is to know the answer: Test, test, and test again. Apply classical direct response techniques, and do a lot of A/B testing.
To fully understand how email marketing fuels your overall inbound strategy you must test:
- Frequency rates
- Subject lines
- Creative content
- Click rates
- Landing pages
- Offers
- Pricing
Optimize what works and find the right mix to maximize sales volume – at an acceptable cost per sale.
Yes, all this does take time and effort. But by performing this channel preference overview, you realize what misery and potential legal and compliance issues you avoid in the long run…
For Every Action, A Reaction
While email remains a popular and profitable channel for marketers, there are downsides.
It is highly regulated, partially thanks to its explosive growth (and some say exploitation) in the early 2000s, resulting in the CAN-SPAM Act. CAN-SPAM is a law that sets the rules for commercial email, establishes requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and spells out tough penalties for violations.
Additionally, email overload is a real and present danger for marketers.
Can you think of a better time than the holidays to see a demonstration of email marketing burnout? When you receive multiple unwanted emails (even if you’ve opted into messaging), aren’t you turned off? Doesn’t that company become annoying?
The end result is that a once low-priced channel has been completely neutralized, resulting in decreased open, click and purchase rates. Worse yet, you may wind up permanently blocked or trapped forever in spam filters.
You guessed it…using email as a marketing channel has its positives and negatives. The key is to figure out what works with your customers who prefer email: frequency, content, pricing, and offers.
Ready to improve your tactics through channel preference?
At AnalyticsIQ, we provide our clients with the quality data and insights they need to launch personalized marketing strategies to achieve their targets while maximizing their ROI.
We have and provide an ethical approach to data. Get in touch with us to learn more and take the first step in building tailored communication for your customers.