Have you already discarded email marketing? Let me share something with you. Email marketing is one of the most effective forms of marketing on the web, especially in terms of your customer lifetime value. If you’ve discarded it already, you need to pick it back up.
Let’s start with facts. According to a 2013 Custora study, email marketing will increase your customer lifetime value by 12%. Campaign Monitor found that companies are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than you are from a tweet. McKinsey & Co tells us that email is 40 times more effective at acquiring new customers than Facebook or Twitter. The DMA found when it comes to purchases made as a result of receiving a marketing message, email has the highest conversion rate (66%), when compared to social, direct mail and more. They also discovered a 3800% ROI in email marketing.
When it comes down to it, that’s a lot of money you’re leaving on the table. You may hear people tell you that email is dying, but they’re clearly wrong. The funny thing is, you’ll hear it a lot, and from a lot of different people. My guess is, however, that you’ll only be hearing it from people who don’t check their emails. You know who I’m talking about. The ones with 1,100 notifications for new mail.
Your email inbox is still the place where you are most likely to be drawn in to making a first purchase or an additional purchase. An additional purchase is really the gold mine, too. Any time you can get a client to purchase something extra on their own volition, that’s a good thing. Great email marketing can also be the catalyst to repeat clients.
Here’s how it goes down. You’re out doing research for a purchase and come across someone who wants to trade your email address for extra information. You make the trade, like so many of us do so many times a day, and the emails begin. They send you marketing emails, great content, and all sorts of other stuff that you agreed to. Eventually, if they’ve done their job, you wind up making that purchase from them.
By utilizing great follow up and tracking techniques, you can increase your revenue tremendously.
Even better, if they’re accurately tracking your purchases, they’ll follow up with the right emails at the right times for the things you’re going to buy next. Target did this so well (granted, with mailers) that they wound up predicting a pregnancy before the shopper found out. Or, more accurately, before her dad did.
By utilizing great follow up and tracking techniques, you can increase your revenue tremendously. Let’s pretend that your average profit over the lifetime of every client was $10,000. I get that $10k might be a high number for some of you, but bear with me. If you can increase the CLV of every client by 12%, you’d be leaving $1,200 per client behind by not utilizing email marketing.
What I would do if I were in your shoes right now would be to get together with whoever is running my marketing right now and build a solid email campaign. Start increasing the value of every client. It’s going to be worth every minute it takes to get right. I promise.
