How Can Email Marketing Fuel Your Inbound Strategy? 12 Benefits to Know
As a marketing manager, SVP, or CMO, you’re likely always looking for new ways to expand business and connect with new customers. Email marketing campaigns can help you achieve these goals. Not only is it ripe with benefits for your organization—from increasing brand awareness to developing stronger relationships with customers and potential leads—it offers the highest return on investment (ROI) of all other marketing strategies, providing an average of a whopping $36 for every $1 spent.
As amazing as that is, ROI isn’t the only reason why email marketing is worth consideration. So, instead of having you guess why email marketing will help your business, I made this article to dig into all the little details and list all the added benefits for you. Simply want the stats to pitch to stakeholders? Check out this list of 60 email marketing statistics every CMO should know.
What Is Email Marketing?
Email marketing is one of the oldest digital marketing software types and the most effective strategy available. It’s a direct marketing method that allows your business to share products, sales, and updates with customers within your contact lists. Your subscribers choose to sign up to receive your emails, making it more likely to convert them to customers compared to other marketing channels.
Email marketing is considered the most effective marketing strategy, outranking digital marketing methods such as social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and affiliate marketing. This is because you can directly reach your target audience with personalized, relevant content. Email marketing is also cost-effective, easily tracked, and offers valuable information to help you analyze performance.
Typically, marketers will use email marketing software like Mailchimp or ActiveCampaign to manage their email campaigns.
What Is Inbound Marketing?
Inbound marketing is a customer-centric approach to marketing that focuses on attracting, engaging, and delighting potential customers by providing them with valuable and relevant content. Unlike traditional outbound marketing, which interrupts audiences with advertisements, inbound marketing seeks to solve problems and meet the needs of potential customers. It involves creating and sharing informative content, such as blog posts, videos, social media posts, and podcasts, to draw people in and establish a connection.
By offering valuable content, businesses can build trust and credibility, leading to long-term relationships with customers. Inbound marketing also involves techniques like search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, email marketing, and content creation, all aimed at aligning the content with the interests and challenges of the target audience. Inbound marketing aims to attract qualified leads, nurture them, and convert them into loyal customers, often using various free and paid digital marketing platforms to do so.
The Top 12 Benefits Of Email Marketing For Inbound Strategy
Here are some of the most significant benefits of email marketing for your inbound strategy.
1. Building and Nurturing Relationships
Successful businesses need strong customer relationships. Email marketing can help you achieve this by creating and sending campaigns your customers are interested in. This strategy improves communication with your subscribers, resulting in strengthened customer relationships. Email marketing empowers you to give customers what they want and get feedback on topics you can use to build customer loyalty. Customers want to feel as if your brand is thinking about them, and sending regular, targeted emails to your list is the best way to keep them in the loop.
2. Content Distribution
While email marketing is a powerful inbound marketing method on its own, you can make it more beneficial by integrating it with other content distribution channels and marketing tools. For example, you can integrate email marketing with social media content by including links to your social media profiles, encouraging subscribers to follow your pages, and promoting email campaigns on your social media profiles. You can also use email marketing to promote content marketing efforts, such as blog posts. Integrating email marketing with other content distribution methods allows you to reach a wider audience, receive more leads, and enhance conversions.
3. Lead Generation
Email marketing can help your teams generate brand awareness with your target audience and inform leads of new products, resources, products, services, and company changes. You can implement email marketing strategies that consist of sending regular education messages regarding desirable offerings that encourage inactive leads to transition into hot leads. You can take this one step further by personalizing content to potential leads by utilizing data such as purchase history, demographics, browsing behavior, and more to customize your messaging to meet your audience’s specific needs and interests—which can encourage more people to choose your company over the competition.
4. Lead Nurturing
Marketers can use email marketing strategies to nurture leads to take prospects on a journey that can impact their buying behavior. Built using data, analytics, and user behavior information, you can use email marketing to customize campaigns that are targeted and engaging and take leads through the next steps in your organization’s sales funnel. Email marketing helps by enabling you to offer actionable insights to your recipients that encourage them to take action. Emails are an excellent way of reaching your leads and turning them into conversions that enhance brand growth.
5. Segmentation and Personalization
Reaching out to subscribers individually can be costly and time-consuming. Email segmentation can help your team save time by contacting your broader target audience while also delivering personal, relevant messages to them. Through proper targeting, you can drive up to three times the revenue per email of broadcast messages. Using personalized email content also enables you to grow your email marketing audience because it helps them understand that you’re thinking of them. Personalized content also creates more value for your customers and helps them connect with your brand.
6. Driving Traffic to Your Website
Websites are vital for all businesses, but sometimes, getting your target audience to visit them can be challenging—which is where email marketing can help. Email marketing campaigns are an excellent method for increasing traffic to your website because you can directly link your website in your emails. Some ways you can encourage subscribers to click on your link to get to your website include sending out weekly newsletters that keep your subscribers informed about your company but also include links to blog posts where they can read more about specific topics. You can also send emails regarding special offers, which can help you drive sales by getting customers to your website.
7. Lead Scoring and Qualification
Email lead scoring and qualification is an excellent way to improve your email opens and conversions. Email campaigns work more effectively after completing your research and setting up a scoring system. You can implement automated emails that are sent when someone reaches a specific lead score. Giving a score based on your recipient’s actions that they take or don’t take can help you make decisions that optimize and enhance your subsequent campaigns.
8. Product and Service Updates
One challenge you might experience in your business is keeping customers interested in your products or services. Email marketing can help you update and keep your audience’s attention without overwhelming them with unwanted details. While your subscribers might not be ready to act immediately, when your audience sees that you have something that can help them solve an issue, they’ll be more likely to act when the time’s right.
9. Feedback and Surveys
Businesses always look for ways to improve, and customer feedback can help your organization improve processes. Use an email blast to collect feedback from customers. You can send customer surveys and ask customers to respond with any feedback they have about your organization. This provides a quick way to track what to improve based on customers’ responses and needs. Positive customer experiences are crucial, and collecting feedback is an excellent method for ensuring your customers are loyal to your brand.
10. Promotions and Offers
As much as you want to believe customers know everything about your products and services, there’s a good chance many don’t. Email marketing allows you to take a proactive approach and improve the exposure of your offering. Sending emails promoting special offers has the additional benefit of increased traffic to your website or storefront, where your audience can make a purchase.
11. Re-Engagement of Inactive Customers
Email marketing can help you revive relationships with subscribers who have stopped engaging with your content. You can establish campaigns that consist of reaching out to inactive customers through targeted messages, offers, or incentives so they’ll re-engage with your business. Using email marketing to re-engage with inactive subscribers can increase revenue, gain valuable feedback about why they disengaged, and help you improve future marketing strategies.
12. Data Collection
Gathering data can help you and your team understand how your email campaigns are performing. The metrics you collect can help you market smarter and better understand your audience's needs and interests. After collecting this data, you can better identify your target audience and tailor your next email marketing campaign to this audience. You can use email marketing analytics tools to glean some really cool insights about who your customers are and how they interact with your products/website.
Bettering Your Inbound Business
Email marketing is an excellent, cost-effective, conversion-rich strategy. It helps your business reach new audiences and increase revenue, even on the smallest budgets. The bottom line is that regular communication with customers and prospects is essential. You can use email marketing to meet these expectations and more by creating mutually beneficial relationships between your brand and email subscribers.
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