There are several reasons why you should be doing email marketing as a business, and these are not just limited to keeping in touch and relationship building with your customers and potential customers.
Link Building
The links created as part of your email campaign drive traffic to your website, a simple fact, but what gets overlooked is that these links more often than not are on subdomains of high ranking sites, while they might only pass a little juice, every little helps. Some email providers might not pass any juice and give you no-follow links instead, but if you tick the box for enabling Google Analytics in your email builder, UTM’s and little votes of confidence are created.
Quality Engaged Traffic
Your contact list is full (hopefully) of contacts that want to hear from you, that will click on the links in your email and visit your site. These contacts are more likely to spend a significant amount of time on your website and also visit other pages, reducing your bounce rate and increasing average time on site.
Encourages sharing
The most accessible medium to share online is an email, it’s a quick click of a button, and off it goes to the next person, it also lasts longer than social media as emails can sit in peoples inboxes even after they have read them. You can also actively encourage people to share the email with friend, family and colleagues.
Better Engagement Than Social
Social media can provide us with flexibility when it comes to timing for getting content out to our audience. Still, organic reach and engagement are minimal, with results typically around 1-2% of audience reach and minimum engagement. The result, minimal traffic. Email on the other hand, with an average campaign yielding a reach of around 20-22% and 10-13% engagement from that, take 10% of an audience of 100,000, that’s 10,000 visitors going to the website, you also have control over when you are going to send them there.
Timing is Key
Your audience is likely to open the email within the first 2 hours of it being sent. If you have a time-sensitive message, such as a special offer on your website, you can maximise traffic and engagement, giving your quality signals a boost at the same time.
Customer Experience and Testing
If you have a new theme for your website and you want to test it out to see what impact it might have before going into full development and A/B testing on the site, email can provide a safety net to stop poor performance impacting on customer experience. Beyond the visual, there is content testing, if you find that certain elements have a better effect than others, why would you keep it at just that, an email. Take the results and apply them to the website, thereby improving the experience and journey for others that might not be getting the emails.
Goals
Within Google Analytics, goal setting is the norm. But these too can be little votes of confidence. One email orientated goal would be having people register their details via a signup form or popup. On completion you get taken to another page, reducing your bounce rate from your home page, checking the box for goal complete and sending yet another positive signal to Google that your site has quality traffic going through it.