I just got back a few days ago from a trip to Texas and the International Quilt Market. It's a great event, it's actually the event where we first launched Stride Retail. But that's a story for another day. While at market we had the opportunity to do a couple of presentations at Quilt Market's learning experience called "Schoolhouse."
This year, we chose a couple of different topics to discuss. I thought that maybe, people that didn't make it to Market might be interested in learning what we shared. So, here goes. Over the next few blog posts I'm going to try and summarize what we shared while at market. Our goal is that you find it insightful enough to implement in your business.
Email Marketing
In today's world it's easy to get overwhelmed with all the new and emerging ways to engage with your customers. Platforms like CommentSold, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tiktok are all vying for your marketing dollars, time, and energy. Do not get me wrong. These are great platforms, but I worry that sometimes we overlook the "tried and true" methods of engaging with our customers in exchange for the "new and exciting."
Emailing is not dead. Emailing customers is still one of the most effective ways to reach your customers. Don't take it from me. Here are a few of the stats to prove it.
- High Return on Investment (ROI): According to Sixth Sense Marketing emails can have an extremely high return on investment. Businesses can expect returns of up to $36 - $40 for every dollar spent. I don't know about you, but that's pretty amazing.
- Click-through rates are still high: Even in today's world where people are bombarded with notifications and emails, open rates for emails is still over 20%, click through rates can be as high as 4.7%. That might not sound super high, but it's actually very effective.
- Impact on Consumer Behavior: 60% of consumers make purchases based directly or indirectly on marketing emails. Personalized and segmented emails can have even higher engagement and conversion.
- Preferred Communication Channel: Email is preferred by both businesses and consumers for communication. 81% of consumers will open an email on their phone. Email is indeed a direct channel to your consumers' pockets...and consequently their pocketbooks.
This is why I'm still excited over email. Let others go out and chase the new methods. Let other people learn the lessons. Yes, some of them may make it big and we should be excited for them. Not everyone needs to be a TikTok star or to sell millions on CommentSold. There is a time and place for that. I don't have the face or composure to do live sales or create TikTok videos but I do think I could send a lot of emails and test some different methods to engage customers that way. Maybe you can too.
The Proof is in the Pudding (or so they say).
One of the things I also love about email marketing is it is easy to track and see just how effective you are being. I'll share a couple of examples from a Stride user (their company name has been removed).
This email was sent to about 600 contacts and from it, over $3600 in revenue was generated. Now, I'm not great at math, but even if this email took 2 hours to build and this customer paid someone $50 an hour to build the email that's only $100. And, if I multiply $100x$36 (ROI from above) I get...surprise $3600. This pans out perfectly.
And just to prove that it's not a one time fluke, here's another example:
If we do the same math, just a different way. Total revenue generated $4485 divided by the cost of let's say $100 we get a total ROI for this email of $4485/$100 = 44.85. Again, that checks out.
I will be the first to admit, that if you started today, I don't think you would hit those numbers. However, with consistency and a little bit of effort generating high ROI via email marketing is definitely achievable. And, as an added bonus, if you use Stride, you can track all this right in your system.
Conclusion:
Email marketing is not dead. It continues and will continue to be a valuable way to communicate with and promote your products and services to your customers. Most emails go directly to your customers phones...and consequently to their pockets. Those that put in the effort to craft email campaigns that are targeted to their audience stand a good chance of achieving a high ROI.
Tune in next week to learn about trends in email marketing.
Nate loves to chat with people about email marketing and Stride Retail. If you want to book a demo with him to learn more about Stride's emailing capabilities feel free to snag a time off his calendar.