Email mar­ket­ing, when done right, can boost your business.

Most of us are signed up to receive e‑newsletters from our favorite sources on a dai­ly, week­ly, fort­night­ly or even ran­dom basis. More than like­ly, you have your favorite e‑newsletters that you keen­ly antic­i­pate receiv­ing and oth­ers you might have for­got­ten about com­plete­ly until they land in your inbox.

There are so many chan­nels where you can reach your cus­tomers these days—Facebook, Twit­ter, Insta­gram, LinkedIn—businesses should be putting just as much ener­gy and effort, if not more, into their elec­tron­ic direct mail (EDM) strategy.

Once some­one has sub­scribed to receive emails from your com­pa­ny, you’ve already estab­lished some kind of rela­tion­ship with them. We can’t always say the same for oth­er chan­nels and espe­cial­ly social media where we know there is a lot of noise.

Here are 3 rea­sons why you should be using elec­tron­ic direct mails (EDMs) to com­mu­ni­cate with your audience.

#1 – Email marketing is very cost-effective

Sure, social media mar­ket­ing can be cost-effec­tive but email mar­ket­ing is even more cost-effec­tive. The only fee you real­ly need to cov­er is the email mar­ket­ing plat­form you choose. Gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, the more pop­u­lar plat­forms such as MailChimp are free to use until you gen­er­ate a cer­tain num­ber of sub­scribers (and even then, it’s a rel­a­tive­ly small fee depend­ing on how many sub­scribers you have). Once you’re signed up, you can send as many EDMs as you need to with­out pay­ing a cent—the only cost is the resource you put into build­ing the EDM (staff, any design costs etc).

#2 – It’s fantastic for relationship building

When you know who your cus­tomer is, what they need from you and how to com­mu­ni­cate with them using the lan­guage they under­stand, you’re high­ly like­ly to suc­ceed with EDM cam­paigns. Exper­i­ment a lit­tle in terms of what times and days work best with your audi­ence through open and click-through rates.

Once this is estab­lished, con­sis­ten­cy is key. So, stick to the same day and time so that your cus­tomers know when to hear from you. Most email mar­ket­ing ser­vices will allow you to sched­ule your cam­paigns ahead of time and pro­vide you with the data you need to see what’s work­ing with your audi­ence and what isn’t.

Send­ing emails can be an effec­tive mar­ket­ing tool as it reach­es your tar­get audi­ence effectively.

#3 – Email marketing arms you with powerful insights about your audience

 

The more you know about your audi­ence, the bet­ter. Email plat­forms such as MailChimp pro­vide pow­er­ful built-in ana­lyt­ics that allows you to track how your cam­paigns are per­form­ing. You can eas­i­ly ascer­tain what kind of con­tent your cus­tomers are respond­ing to and what con­tent is miss­ing the mark. The fol­low­ing tools will assist you in help­ing to track audi­ence engagement:

  • Opens and click-throughs
  • Shares
  • Google Ana­lyt­ics
  • Email bounce rates

If you haven’t done much with your EDM strat­e­gy or have doubts about the suc­cess of effec­tive EDM strate­gies, do your home­work. You’ll quick­ly see that plan­ning and imple­ment­ing a strong EDM mar­ket­ing cam­paign is cru­cial to your suc­cess in busi­ness today. It’s one of the few ways in which you can com­mu­ni­cate direct­ly with your cus­tomers and tar­get market.