This is a good question – are your emails being read? Marketing today is tough-going especially if you’re doing the same as you ever have i.e. impersonal, transactional and always focused on what’s in it for you.
Today consumers demand more and marketers who don’t focus their content to please their intended audience end up with emails being ignored.
Some businesses are falling into the trap of just using social media to share their digital marketing campaigns.
Marketers have either forgotten the ‘tried and true’ channel “email” or they’ve fallen into the trap of believing email no longer works. This is a big mistake – email marketing remains the best channel for communication, conversion (clicking of links within the eDM) and engagement (taking further action once they’re where you want them to be – on your website or landing page).
Content marketing has gotten a lot smarter and it’s rewarding businesses and marketers globally with higher rates of conversion. Marketers are always looking for proven strategies that provide their clients with higher rates of user engagement. Interactive content marketing (ICM) is it and there are lots of different tools to use, many which gleam a bit more data out of the user for the business. It could be said that ‘interactive content marketing is ‘remarketing’ on steroids.
There’s no way to avoid content marketing, it’s huge business and projected to grow to an annual spend of more $3 billion (USD) by 2019. It’s fair to say for the majority of marketers, they’re using content marketing in some form whether they’re cognisant of it or not. Businesses whom have embraced it for some time will now be using ’Interactive Content Marketing’ to improve their campaigns.
Buzzwords have been around for over 60 years and according to the Buzzword entry in Wikipedia, businesses would fail to operate these days without them. So let’s introduce you to a recent buzzword in the digital marketing space – ‘Digital Storytelling’.
Content marketing has come of age yet New Zealand businesses are slow on the uptake and this has in many ways worked in its favour. Mistakes have been made and strategies tested and honed so now is the time for local businesses to jump onboard and embrace it.
Most businesses have been doing emailing marketing for so many years is there anything new to learn? Yes. An article contributed to BusinessBlogs recently is trending right now. It has valuable recommendations for businesses specially those whom use it as their primary channel for new business prospects.
In our earlier blog article Email List Size Matters we analysed why your email lists are so valuable to your business and what steps to take to look after them and also attract more subscribers. We don’t have ultimate control over our social profiles and pages and so many of the channels that feed our business with visitors and clients yet we spend a lot of time and money nurturing them; often with dedicated personnel tasked with updating and posting regularly throughout the day. As a business we need to also focus on what we do own now more so then ever before.
The size of your email list should be your focus in 2017. Grow it. Set up online and offline campaigns dedicated to list-building. The campaigns need to be relevant to your target audience and capture the basic information initially then follow-up with campaigns that are more targeted. Next, analyse your follow-up campaigns and all email marketing statistics to build segments of your email list subscribers so your business can target it’s offerings more accurately and be rewarded with a higher success rate.
Is your business wondering if email marketing is still relevant in 2017? You’d be forgiven for asking the question given how long it’s been around and all the other digital marketing channel now available. The very good news is – email marketing is not only relevant it is still considered the top performer when compared to social media marketing, search and offline too – wow!
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