How – and why – you should email market in 2023
Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash
These days, when you talk about digital marketing, it’s easy to jump straight to Instagram reels or funny dances on TikTok.
This is fair enough. After all, digital marketing and social media marketing pretty much go hand in hand in 2023, with a huge 93.79% of businesses using social media for marketing in one way or another.
But it might surprise you to learn that social media is not the only marketing platform available. We know, shocking, right?!
In fact, there’s one digital marketing avenue that’s been around for nearly 40 years – before digital marketing was even a thing.
The power of email marketing
Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about emails. Good old emails.
Twenty years ago, you would have been hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t open every single one of their emails and read every line. Back then, of course, it was just an electrical form of direct mail.
Today, however, things are slightly different. In total, 333.2 billion emails were sent and received every day in 2022, and most of these emails either go directly into “junk” or left to fade away into page two, then three, and then into eternity.
Most of these emails would have been sent for marketing purposes, too. In fact, for B2B companies, email marketing is still the number one most effective marketing tool – click here to learn about others.
But how can that be the case in 2023 if it’s so easy to pass them off as spam or bin them off entirely?
The strategy of email marketing
Well, email marketing remains one of the top marketing channels for B2B – and B2C companies, for that matter – because of the strategy good companies take to optimise it.
The reason so many emails are glanced over, for example, is that they are immediately evident as an advertising message. They are not relevant to the customer as an individual; they are only relevant to the company that has sent them.
The best companies, however, take email marketing one step further. Instead of giving customers an unwanted message lingering in their inbox, they create a message that is personalised to them.
This is one of the only ways to do this in the 2023 digital marketing world. On social media, everything’s out in the open and – despite appearances – relatively impersonal. Website content is essentially a wall of information – no matter how engaging – and online advertising is exactly that.
With emails, however, you get the opportunity to speak to a customer on an individual level. The emails sent can be personalised with segmentation, taking into account location, gender and role. They can be sent at optimum times, they can be directed specifically at what the customer likes or doesn’t like, and they can be used as a way to earn consumer trust. They can even involve tips and tricks and other dynamic content.
In short, email marketing offers a one-to-one experience between you and the customer, and the best companies utilise it to bump up engagement and really incentivise the customer to interact with the company itself. That’s what makes it such a strong tool in 2023 – and certainly better than any TikTok dance!
