They say that email marketing is ineffective and dead but would you believe us if we told you that it is still alive and kicking? Would you also believe us if we say that email marketing is as effective as any marketing strategy? In fact, email is one of the low cost yet effective marketing strategies today with revenue going up to 28% a year if done right.
Here are some facts to get you thrilled about email marketing, and easy steps on how to create a successful email marketing strategy.
- The ratio dollar spent to investment return is $1 to $45.
- Email marketing generates leads 3 times higher than leads obtained from social media marketing in social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter.
- Companies who use emails to market spend less but reap more by 50%.
Some might argue that it doesn’t work the same way for their company. True, email marketing may be a hit or miss for some businesses but to make it an effective strategy, you will need to maximize it to its full potential. Now the big question is: how?
Let us first look into why some email marketers fail to bring profit to their business. The reason? Bad email data management. This happens when you are not looking into and managing your email address data on a regular basis. You might be thinking that you’re always monitoring your email data but at what point does that make it bad?
This is where data decay enters the picture, where data ages over time. The reasons on why data decays are due to following user factors:
- Title and/or job change/function
- Change in living address
- Contact detail changes such as phone numbers and email addresses
- Company changes such as employees or rebranding of company name
- Name change like divorce and/or marriage
- Human error when typing email addresses
On an average, data decays by 2% every month that is equivalent to almost 30% of your contact data going “bad”. In fact, one of the biggest causes on why companies often fail in email marketing is through human error when collecting and typing email addresses.
By now, you might realize that maintenance and clean-up of your email database is essential if you want to avoid your data from decaying fast. That’s why there are tools such as appends and validation provider to help you out.
However, looking for the perfect fit isn’t easy. You also have to search through a lot of providers who claim that they will do the best for you but end up being sub-par, making you lose leads and money. Therefore here is a checklist for you to narrow down on the best ones:
- Must have a validation process to identify spam, invalid emails, etc.
- Must be updated frequently so as not to be “behind the time”
- Provides accurate data
- Within your budget
Take note that not all may check out on everything so it is also best to focus on major components that you want to see in their service.
Don't give up on email marketing, it's one of the biggest channels for lead generation. Download our FREE check list and make sure you're following these 10 simple hacks for your successful email marketing strategy.
