93% of web users subscribe to permission-based email
Email marketing is often overshadowed by social and mobile, with frequent debate over whether email is even relevant to web users anymore. But perceptions about email’s demise are off-target. It remains a key activity among internet users of all ages, and marketers have become more sophisticated in how they use it in order to optimize their chances of success.
“Best practices for email marketing can be summarized in one sentence,” said David Hallerman, eMarketer principal analyst and author of the new report, “10 Best Practices for Email Marketing.” “Get accurate and detailed data from people who want to hear from you, then automate the numerous steps involved in sending them relevant messages.”
Perhaps email’s greatest strength is its status as a central communications medium, used by virtually all web users both for personal and marketing messages. According to ExactTarget, 93% of US internet users get at least one permission-based email daily.
Effective email marketing depends on several factors—and many of them are entirely in marketers’ control, as long as they pay attention to certain elements for enhancing email’s impact. They include:
- Ongoing steps to ensure that effective emails are delivered to the recipient’s inbox at a time when they might be read.
- Finding a balance between outsourcing the email process and keeping it in-house.
- Making the most of automation to customize and trigger emails based on a recipient’s activities and interests.
- Optimizing emails and landing pages for multiple devices, notably mobile.
- Convincing recipients to share their emails with others.
- Testing campaign aspects to boost email open rates, clicks and other factors—and continually retesting.
These elements can help build effective email marketing programs that get messages into the inbox, get them read and, hopefully, acted on.
“Not only does email usage remain a prime activity among internet users of all ages, it allows marketers to contact their target audience with timing and personalized details that social sites cannot match,” said Hallerman. “And the rise of mobile usage helps marketers reach their customers via email more than before, since many people use those devices to check email much more frequently than they might have in the past.”
The full report, “10 Best Practices for Email Marketing” also answers these key questions:
- What is the most fundamental strategy for email marketing?
- How does automation make email far more effective?
- Why must marketers look at email as only a stepping stone?
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