At the beginning of March, lots of small stores and businesses had an obligatory 2-hour break thanks to a Meta Outage that no one expected. Due to this, the conversations online sparked around DIVERSIFICATION and staying reachable at all times: being available on other platforms outside of Meta (like your website or Google My Business profile) and staying reachable is crucial when Social Media platforms stop working.
The outage is, of course, old news by now (it has been over a month, so we probably should get over it now), but one thing is sure: your Social Media profiles and content do not 100% belong to you.
Your Email Lists – Your Leads
Believe it or not, emails are a form of currency online: they represent direct access to your audience, free from the whims of social media platforms. Your email list is one of your most valuable assets.
We are all familiar with Social Media Algorithms – we even wrote an article about it in the past – the algorithm basically defines what and who sees what content based on the user’s preferences and input. The algorithms can limit your reach as, if your ideal client or audience does not frequently interact with content like yours, the platform is less likely to feed your content to them. Building an email list is a great way to avoid the algorithm: email marketing allows direct communication with your audience, without the intervention of a third party. You control when and what you communicate.
Not only does having your own list help with content delivery, but it helps with targeting. You can’t segment your Facebook and Instagram followers nor target only a partial audience (at least not organically), but you can do that with your email list, allowing you to tailor your content to specific segments of your audience.
What About The Low Conversion Rates?
The whole “email marketing is dead” is wrong, to be honest with you. While people tend to believe that email marketing has poor performance and that conversion rates are low, there is nothing as far from reality as that.
According to Mayple, the average conversion rate for email marketing is between 2 and 5%. But with an average ROI of $36-$40 for every $1 spent. When you compare this performance to other forms of advertising (for Facebook Ads, for example, for every $1 spent you earn an average of $9.21 in return), the ROI of email marketing is not only not bad, but it is better for some industries.
Of course, those conversion rates assume we are talking to a list of interested people: those who subscribed to your list willingly, people who purchased your products before, etc. Warm leads basically. The reality of cold email marketing might be different, but we will leave that for another article.
Emails are an effective channel for nurturing leads and driving conversions. Through strategic email campaigns, you can guide subscribers through the customer journey, from awareness to purchase and beyond.
The Metrics
It is a wonderful time to market! Back in the 1900s (I know, that sounds super dramatic and far away) a campaign’s performance was hard to measure: you could have an idea of how many people were seeing your advertising pieces (printed, radio, or TV), but having exact conversion rates, segmentation or audience feedback and insights was not an easy task as most of the traditional media were (and still are) more of a one-way communication path.
That changed with the BOOM of digital media. Both, Social Media and email marketing platforms provide valuable data and insights into your audience’s behavior, preferences, and engagement metrics. You can use this data to optimize campaigns, improve targeting, and enhance the overall customer experience.
Most email marketing platforms will offer you the same basic insights and metrics to track the performance of your campaigns:
- Open Rates: Measure the percentage of recipients who open your emails. High open rates indicate effective subject lines and engaging content.
- Click-Through Rates (CTR): Track the percentage of recipients who click on links within your emails. CTR indicates the effectiveness of your call-to-action and content relevance.
- Conversion Rates: Measure the percentage of recipients who complete a desired action, such as making a purchase or signing up for a webinar, after clicking on a link in your email.
- Bounce Rates: Monitor the percentage of emails that were not successfully delivered to recipients’ inboxes. High bounce rates may indicate issues with email deliverability or outdated email lists.
- Unsubscribe Rates: Track the percentage of subscribers who opt out of receiving further emails from your list. Analyzing unsubscribe rates can provide insights into content relevance, frequency, and audience preferences.
- Segmentation Performance: Evaluate the performance of segmented email campaigns compared to non-segmented ones. Segmentation allows for targeted messaging and personalized content, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates.
Understanding these metrics and insights will help you make data-driven decisions, refine your strategies, and optimize your email campaigns for better results and ROI.
Would you consider building an email list? Do you have one already? Don’t forget that – whatever you do – nurturing those relationships is crucial. An email list that you do not interact with is nothing but a bunch of useless data.
