Email marketing has been around for decades and has been a staple part of the marketing strategy of businesses that have experienced tremendous growth over the years. However, with the ever-evolving digital landscape, it's easy to forget the importance of this tried and true method of communication. The reality is that email marketing is still a powerful tool for growth marketing and can play a crucial role in driving business growth. In this article, we'll dive into the role that email marketing plays in creating a growth marketing strategy,  and how it should be leveraged to achieve success. 

Email marketing is the use of email to promote products or services, build customer loyalty, or achieve any other marketing objective. It involves sending targeted and personalized messages to a group of subscribers, who have voluntarily signed up to receive emails from a company. This allows businesses to reach out to their audience directly and in a cost-effective manner. The goal of email marketing is to engage with customers, build relationships, and ultimately drive conversions and sales.

It can also be used to share news, updates, and promotions with customers, as well as to gather valuable insights and feedback, anything that ultimately brings prospects closer to making a commitment with you, be it signing up to your email list, a demonstration or sales consultation, let alone a sale or a contract or licensing agreement. In short, email marketing is very much a crucial and underrated component of modern marketing and a powerful tool for businesses looking to grow and succeed.

In particular, recent movements towards data privacy-centric browsing and the phasing out of third-party data have caused a shift in the way businesses perceive email marketing. With Google dropping third-party cookies in Chrome, and the iOS 14 update with its Intelligent Tracking Prevention feature (ITP), collecting first-party data and using it effectively has become more important than ever in order to maintain engagement with customers and potential customers. 

In this blog post, we will explore the importance of email marketing in today’s digital landscape, as well as how businesses can leverage it in the midst of changing legal data landscape, and why email marketing remains one of the most powerful and underrated forms of digital marketing available. 

Why email marketing is underrated as a growth marketing tactic

Despite its effectiveness, email marketing is often underrated as a marketing channel. While some may consider it to be outdated or irrelevant in today’s world of social media and search engine advertising, email marketing remains one of the most powerful tools in a growth marketer’s arsenal. 

In fact, email marketing has an average ROI of $36 for every $1 spent – making it one of the most cost-effective forms of marketing available. Let’s delve deeper into the reasons why email marketing should not be overlooked as a crucial component of any successful marketing strategy: 

• Reinforcing the growth marketing funnel/Helping close ecommerce sales: One of the most effective uses of email marketing is to recover lost sales through abandoned cart emails, retargeting campaigns, and post-purchase follow-up emails. These types of campaigns can help increase conversion rates and revenue for e-commerce businesses.

• Drip email campaigns: Drip email campaigns are an excellent way to nurture leads and build relationships with prospects. By sending a series of targeted messages at set intervals, businesses can stay top of mind with their audience and encourage them to take the next step in the customer journey.  This is extremely common with SaaS and enterprise software or B2B marketing, where the process of comparing different offerings from competitors elicits targeted messages based on the stage they are at in the purchasing or decision-making process.

• Low cost/High ROI: Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels available. With minimal costs involved in creating and sending emails, businesses can achieve a high ROI with relatively little investment beyond creating a well-crafted promotional email.

• Instant results: With a well-maintained email database, businesses can quickly send targeted messages to their audience and see instant results. Unlike other marketing channels that may take time to gain traction, email marketing can provide immediate feedback and allow for rapid iteration and improvement.

• No algorithm changes: Unlike other marketing channels that are subject to the whims of ever-changing algorithms, email marketing is a more stable and predictable channel. As long as businesses comply with email regulations and maintain good email practices, they can consistently reach their audience without worrying about algorithm updates.

• Versatility: Email marketing can be used for a variety of purposes, from building customer loyalty to promoting new products or services.

Applying Email Marketing As Part of Creating a Growth Marketing Funnel Should Not be Overlooked Under Any Circumstances

Despite the rise of social media, email remains the most effective way to nurture leads and boost customer loyalty.

There are many reasons you should make email marketing one of your top priorities, but here are the top 3:

1. Email is the #1 communication channel: Did you know that at least 99% of consumers check their email on a daily basis? That can’t be said of any other communication channel.

2. You own your list. On any social media platform, your account (along with all your fans and posts) could be suspended or deleted at any time, for any reason, without notice. However, you own your email list. No one can take those leads away from you.

3. Email just converts better. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers. In fact, email marketing has an ROI (returns on investment) of 4400%. That’s huge!  The average order value of an email is at least three times higher than that of social media.

Why Email Marketing Needs to Be An Especially Important Aspect of Your Growth Marketing Strategy

Let’s put it this way: not everyone is on Facebook. Not everyone is on Snapchat. There’s a long list of social media channels out there, not everyone is on.

Everyone has an email address.

That is why email marketing campaigns are so important for your overall digital marketing strategy. Your email list can go with you as you grow as a marketer, entrepreneur, and business owner. It’s a portable asset. The best thing about email marketing channel is that it is also cost-effective.

There are a lot of digital marketing channels out there that change very dramatically or they die. What has value today may not necessarily have value tomorrow:

• Ranking #1 on AltaVista in 1997 was fantastic for any business—but it’s not that important now. Does AltaVista even exist anymore?

• Having a Myspace page was, back in 2002, absolutely amazing. Today, not so much.

Rules change all the time.

Google and Facebook can change their rules all the time. Different social networks can expand and contract all the time. Email does not, on the other hand, change all that often.

Email Marketing is an Integral Part of Growth Marketing Operations 

Email is simply the best way to make sales or generate business online. Now that you know the importance of email marketing, let’s learn the different ways that businesses need to have email as part of their growth marketing framework, in order to maximize the extent to which they benefit from it.

Transactional emails

An example of a transactional email is receipts: You buy something on Amazon, and you get a transactional email receipt.

Forgotten password emails, support tickets, and sign-up details. Double opt-in for your email list, the unsubscribing email, and the shipping details for an order, these are all transactional emails.

Content emails

Content emails are those that are meant to provide value to your email subscribers and nurture your relationship with them.

One of the most common examples here is the welcome email: Maybe you just got a user’s email address or they have just signed up as a customer and you can send them an email thanking them as a welcome.

Basically, any content that you create and share via email (blog posts, brand awareness emails, free tools, exclusive content like email newsletters) can be considered essentially, a content email.

Conversion emails

These are the emails you use to try to generate conversions or help to move the subscriber further along in the funnel.

Any type of promotional emails, new product emails, special offers, upgrades, webinars, or any event invitations, lead magnets, etc, are all considered to be conversion emails.

The 2 methods of email distribution

• Broadcast emails;

• Automated emails.

The rule of thumb in email marketing is that you should use email automation for most of your email marketing efforts.  Manual broadcasts are not ideal for most businesses.

Broadcast emails

There are only two types of email you should broadcast:

• Great content suitable for your entire list;

• One-off promotions

• Seasonal promotions (e.g. for Christmas, Black Friday, for example).

It’s totally fine to send emails to your entire list when they are of interest to everyone.

Automated Emails

Email Marketing automation allows you to send effective email content and messaging that is much more specific and contextually relevant to the users.  What goes hand in hand with email automation is segmentation.

Segmentation is a great email marketing strategy to personalize email templates to increase your conversion rate. This marketing tip is a great way to improve your open rates, reduce your unsubscribe rates, and most importantly increase click-through rates.

You send emails based on what each user is interested in and the actions they’re taking on your site. You can do this with an email service provider, or ESP, like MailChimp, ConvertKit, Constant Contact, ActiveCampaign, or Drip, among many others.  Doing this typically leads to an increased click-through rate and, in the end, more conversions.

Some examples of automated email are:

• Receipts,

• Order confirmations,

• Welcome emails,

• Cart-abandonment emails (when users have a product in the cart and leave the site),

• Lead magnets,

• Autoresponders,

• Upsells.

11 email marketing tips to generate better-performing growth marketing campaigns

Email marketing best practices are pretty much evergreen and universal, but the best ways to implement them differ based on industry, state at which your business is, number of subscribers, segments, etc. That being said, these tactics can help to establish a growth marketing framework for both B2C and B2B marketing businesses.

1. Segmenting your email subscriber database

There are many ways to segment, but here are a few of the main ones:

• Demographics: Use your CRM to pull a list of emails according to a specific location.

• Engagement: You might want to re-send or send out a second, slightly different email to subscribers who didn’t open your first one.

• Stage of the customer journey: Cater your offers for new customers vs, long-time customers.

• Source: This involves knowing for instance, which form on your website they filled out to give you their contact info, or what marketing channel they found out about your offer.

2. Personalize your messages

96% of consumers report that they have received mistargeted information or promotions, such as:

• Offers that show they don’t know the customer.

• Mistakes about basic information about the customer.

• Communicating inconsistent messages on different platforms.

68% of customers automatically delete emails that contain these types of mistakes and 54% unsubscribe.

In contrast, personalized emails 

• Emails have a return on investment of 122%.

• Generate up to 50% higher open rates.

• Birthday emails can generate 342% more revenue than regular promotions.

3. Mobile Optimization

A poor mobile experience makes 52% of users less likely to work with a company and 53% said that they would leave a site that doesn’t load within three seconds. Since 70% of emails are opened on a mobile device, and your CTAs all lead back to your site, mobile optimization is crucial.

Mobile-optimized emails consist of:

• Relevant text can be read from a single screen without having to pan over.

• The email and landing page load quickly.

• There are clear, tappable buttons.

• Font type, size, and color are easy on the eyes.

4. Re-engage inactive email subscribers or your existing customer base

While it’s important to be getting a steady stream of new customers, it is imperative not to forget about your existing ones! Oftentimes, you can reengage a dormant customer or reader with an enticing offer and the right email copy. Look back at your data to see what type of content they engaged with before, and send a new and improved version. Or just offer a discount!

If they do not respond, simply remove them to declutter your email list.

5. Use A/B testing to identify and create the ideal email

Test subject lines, body copy, layout, CTA language or button color, images, and more in order to better understand what appeals to your customers and prospects. As with any A/B test, only change one thing at a time so you can draw clear conclusions.

6. Set up trigger/conditional emails to prevent missed opportunities

A triggered email is one that is sent out automatically after a customer takes a certain action. Triggered emails have a 70.5% higher open rate because you’re reaching your readers while they’re engaged. For example, you might send:

• A reminder email shortly after they abandon their cart.

• A feedback request after they complete an order.

• A review request shortly after they purchase.

• A welcome email after they jump on board.

7. Nurture leads to customers

For B2C businesses and low-cost offerings, a new subscriber to your email list may very well become an immediate customer. But for big-ticket purchases and B2B marketing, the decision involves more research and careful thinking. With nurture emails, you send a series of emails that build trust and provide offers that gradually increase.

For example, your series might look like this:

A person subscribes to your list and gets a welcome email. Subsequent emails ask them, in varying orders, to:

1. Download a pocket guide

2. Download an ebook

3. Attend a webinar

4. Read a case study

5. Book a consultation

All of the content you’re providing is high-quality and useful and each “ask” is only a small increase from its precedent, so by the time you ask them to book a consultation, they’ll be likely to do it! Nurturing is a must-have for any lead-generation process.

8. Use storytelling

Here are some ways to use storytelling in an email that can generate exceptional campaign results:

• Tell a short story about your newest product or service and how it came to be. Readers will be interested to see the end result, and they’ll also be reminded of why your offerings are top-quality.

• Share a brief version of a success story of a software implementation, and then link to the full story for more details (ex; you could start with describing the customer’s problem in a way that resonates with your customers), end with impressive (quantifiable) results, then finish off with “How did we do it?” and a “Find out here” CTA.

• Get creative and tell your own story as a primer for the rest of the email

9. Find the right time to send emails

In general, the best time to send marketing emails is:

• During the day

• On a weekday

• Not Monday

• Midweek

. Run A/B tests and use your own data to find optimal times to send your customers marketing emails.

10. Use dynamic content within the framework of your subscriber emails

Dynamic email content is another way to personalize your marketing. With this strategy, the content of your email automatically changes to match based on reader criteria such as gender, geographic location, purchasing patterns, customer segment, or on-site behavior.

Customers will receive the same template but see different images, offers, and calls to action.

11. Try out plain text emails for size

In the midst of animated graphics, sophisticated designs, and trendy aesthetics, there is a growing appreciation among consumers for more minimalistic content. Not only do plain text emails align with this trend, but they also appear better on smartphones, smartwatches, and voice-assisted devices; and travel smoothly through spam, security, and privacy filters.

Best practices for instituting email marketing as part of your growth marketing mix

Email marketing can be an incredibly powerful tool for growth marketing, but it's important to follow best practices to ensure that your campaigns are effective and deliver results. Here are some key best practices to keep in mind:

1. Know who your target audience is: Before you start your email marketing campaigns, take the time to understand your target audience and what they are looking for. This will help you create more relevant, engaging email content that resonates with your subscribers.

2. Segment your email list: Use data from your email campaigns to segment your list based on factors like open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate, but also what aspects of your business it is that your prospects show interest in.  This will help you target your email campaigns more effectively and increase their impact.

3. Focus on value: Make sure that the content of your emails provides value to your subscribers, whether it's through helpful information, exclusive offers, or engaging entertainment.

4. Personalization: Personalize your emails as much as possible, using subscribers' names, interests, and other data to make them feel more relevant and engaging.

5. Keep it simple: Avoid overloading your emails with too much information or too many calls to action. Keep your messaging clear, concise, and focused on the most important elements.

6. Optimize for mobile: Make sure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices, as the majority of people now check their email on their smartphones.

7. Test and refine: Regularly test and refine your email marketing campaigns by trying different subject lines, messaging, and calls to action, and analyzing and determining what works best. 

8. Synchronize email marketing with other growth marketing channels: Integrating email marketing with other marketing channels can help you maximize the impact of your overall marketing efforts and drive better results for your business. By combining the reach and engagement potential of email with other channels like social media, paid advertising, and content marketing, you can create a multi-channel marketing strategy that effectively reaches your target audience and drives conversions.   For instance, you can use social media, blog posts, and other channels to promote your email campaigns and encourage subscribers to sign up for your list.  Try different combinations of channels, messaging, and calls to action, and use data to make data-driven decisions.   By combining the reach of other channels with emails,  your business can target your desired audience more effectively and drive better results for your business.

By following these best practices, you can create effective email marketing campaigns that deliver results and drive growth for your business. 

The future of email marketing as part of an effective growth marketing mix

The role of email marketing in growth marketing moving forward looks bright, rife with new technologies and trends emerging that promise to make email marketing even more effective and impactful. Here are some of the key trends and technologies to watch in the coming years:

1. AI and machine learning: AI and machine learning are already being used to improve email marketing, from predictive sending to personalized content recommendations. As these technologies continue to evolve, they will likely play an even bigger role in the future of email marketing.

2. Interactive content: Interactive content, such as quizzes, polls, and gamified experiences, are growing in popularity, and this incredibly engaging content can be highly engaging and help boost conversions.

3. Voice-activated email: With the rise of voice-activated devices like Amazon's Alexa and Google Home, it's likely that we will see more voice-activated email in the future, providing a more seamless and convenient experience.

4. Video in email:  Video is already a popular form of content, and we can expect to see more video being integrated into email campaigns in the future. Similar to voice, video can be an effective way to engage and connect with subscribers. 

5. The rise of chatbots: Chatbots have more of a functional and operational application, helping businesses automate customer service and provide instant support, making the email experience even more convenient and personalized.

Overall, the future of email marketing in growth marketing looks exciting, with new technologies and trends emerging that promise to make email marketing even more effective and impactful.  Incorporating them into your email marketing strategy to drive better results for your business.

Why Email Marketing Needs to be A Non-Negotiable Part of a Successful Growth Marketing Playbook

In a nutshell, email marketing plays a crucial role in growth marketing. It's an effective way to reach and engage your target audience, build relationships, and drive conversions. By creating personalized, value-driven campaigns and leveraging the latest technologies, you can get the most out of your email marketing efforts and achieve your growth marketing goals. This is why expert email marketing consulting is super valued.

With its ability to deliver results and its low cost relative to other marketing channels, email marketing must not be ignored by any growth-focused business, as part of its overall growth marketing strategy.

With all that being said, if you are looking for help in creating or refining (as well as executing) your email marketing strategy and tactics, why not reach out to us for a free, no-obligation growth marketing consultation?  A session or 2 with our growth marketing experts can help give clarity to just how email marketing fits within your business to know where and how to hit on the right growth levers at the right time.