How Companies Can Engage With Email Marketing

Email marketing isn't the most fashionable way for reaching out to your customers. Social media marketing, content marketing and brand humanization have all become far more prevalent buzzwords of late. There's a perception in certain quarters that emails are a major turnoff for the digitally savvy consumer. The demise of email marketing is predicted on a fairly regular basis.

A now infamous article in The Wall Street Journal heralded the end of email as far back as 2009. However, despite the ever-expanding range of communication options, the humble email continues to dominate the world of digital communications. According to The Radicati Group's Email Statistics Report for 2014, there were 4.12 billion email accounts in existence last year, with a total of 196.3 billion emails sent and received daily.

Email gives you an ideal opportunity to engage with customers and prospects, and evidence suggests that it's still highly effective. According to a Marketo report, 77 percent of consumers said they prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email, compared to just 5 percent for text messages and 4 percent for social media (Facebook). Email generated nearly twice the return on investment compared to other channels, yielding $40.56 for every dollar spent. The channel with the next highest ROI, search engine marketing, yielded $22.44.

It's true that many consumers are becoming adept at tuning out the "white noise" of marketing messages they have no interest in. We're all bombarded with advertisements, pitches and marketing information on a daily basis. In order to reach out to existing and potential customers, it's important to make sure your campaigns are targeted, relevant and engaging.

Effective Targeting
Your email list is your most important asset. How you build it will depend largely on where you're operating. In the European Union and Canada (where new anti-spam legislation came into effect in 2014), customers must opt in to receive commercial emails. In the U.S., direct marketing emails can be sent without an opt-in, but the CAN-SPAM Act does require an opt out and prohibits certain practices such as using misleading headers and subject lines.

A targeted list will be more effective than a random approach, however. There are legal definitions, but spam is in the eye of the beholder and many consumers will view your messages as unwanted if they didn't explicitly opt in to receive them or if your ongoing campaign isn't relevant to their interests.

One way of improving ongoing engagement is to segment your list and send tailored emails to your different segments. According to a Direct Marketing Association survey, unsegmented emails sent to a company's entire list resulted in just 23 percent of total email marketing revenue.

Segmenting can be done in two main ways: demographic attributes such as age, location, income and job title can give you an idea of who your customers are. Behavioral targeting is more concerned with how your contacts behave. Which emails do they open and which do they discard? Which type of offer do they respond to? Did they view specific content on your website, and what (if anything) did they purchase? One of the benefits of email marketing is that you have access to a lot of data that can be used to continually improve your targeting.

Creating Engaging Content
Engaging content starts with the subject line, which should be snappy and grab the reader's attention without being misleading or hyperbolic. Many consumers will decide whether to open a message, delete it or even mark it as spam based on the subject line alone.

In order to truly engage with your audience, your email body should be as personalized and conversational as possible. No one wants to feel like they're being targeted by an automatic process, even if it's obvious that they're not receiving a one-to-one communication from the CEO of your company. Personalization can be as simple as addressing the recipient by name or including other relevant data. A veterinarian's practice, for example, could mention the name of the recipient's pets as well.

A sense of conversation can be created by sending progressive emails that lead naturally on from each other. This is also true of triggered emails, which are sent based on a customer's interactions — e.g., responding to an offer, making a purchase, viewing a specific piece of content, etc. You can also make use of behaviors and purchase histories. The aforementioned vet example could send a reminder email shortly before its customers’ pets are due for their booster shots.

Keep your messages relatively short and place calls to action prominently. You should also ensure that your emails display correctly on the widest possible range of devices, including mobile. In January, it was reported that 48 percent of emails were opened on mobile devices.

Email still provides a great way to reach customers for businesses of all shapes and sizes. In order for your email program to be truly effective, your messages must be relevant, targeted and engaging to the people who receive them.

Christian Arno is the managing director of Lingo24, a translation agency. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter @Lingo24.