The options and resources available to marketers today are many and powerful, including video marketing, social media, blogging, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, referral marketing, and mobile marketing and analytics.

But one marketing tactic continues to perform year after year as one of the best options out there:  email marketing.

It’s a solid, proven strategy that delivers an impressive ROI:  $44 for every $1 spent.

This isn’t to say you don’t need to use other marketing tactics; you absolutely do.  Creating a well-rounded marketing strategy depends on the interplay between various online techniques.  But email marketing is still a foundational part of that process.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing in its simplest form is the use of email to create and maintain permission-based relationships with prospects and customers.

It is permission-based, because sending unsolicited emails to consumers is in direct violation of email regulations (such as the CAN-SPAM act and GDPR).

Consumers give you permission to send them emails when they opt-in to receive information from you.  They may request a report or coupon from your website, take a quiz and ask for the results, or purchase a product and expect follow up.

The key to successful permission- based marketing is to make sure you’re only sending your subscribers the information that they requested and expect.

It is relational because the days of faceless business are over.  Consumers expect and demand the option of a personal touch with every business they deal with, and if they don’t get it, they will move on to one that provides it.

If you only send promotional emails to your contacts, pummeling them with sales messages, they will lose trust in you, become annoyed and unsubscribe or worse — mark your email as spam, damaging your email sender reputation (making it harder for the emails you send to make it to your recipients’ inboxes).

At its best, email marketing is a strategically balanced combination of

• Transactional emails (receipts, login information, etc.)
• Nurture/Relational emails (any email that delivers relevant information and educational content)
• Sales/Promotional emails (emails designed to elicit a sale)

Email Marketing Strategy

Obviously, the majority of your emails should be nurture/relational emails, but getting the balance right requires a marketing strategy.  Rather than randomly sending emails and offers to your subscribers, you’ll want to design a plan that nurtures, engages, sells, and follows up with them.

A robust email service provider such as Infusionsoft makes it easy to segment your contacts as they opt in to your email list, so you can tailor your messaging to their specific interests.

Email Marketing Analytics

Finally, track and analyze your email campaigns. Using the tools provided by your email service platform (such as Infusionsoft), pay attention to how many of your emails are opened, which links are being clicked and how many unsubscribes or spam complaints you get.  This will give you a well-rounded picture of how your list is responding to your campaigns, and you can tweak your strategy as needed.

As your list engagement grows, consider using their behavior to future customize their journey.  For example, if a certain link is clicked in an email, consider that as an indicator of their interest and use that link click to start them on a different journey, always letting their behavior and engagement inform you of what they want and need.

As a marketer, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with the ever-increasing number of channels you have available to you to interact with your prospects.  And while it’s good to use a variety of marketing tactics, you don’t have to (nor can you) use them all.  Email marketing is a time-tested, effective way to engage with your audience and increase sales.

And if you make it your goal that the contacts on your list look forward to your emails and you see a positive ROI, you’re a rock star email marketer 🙂

There’s a lot of talk about digital marketing right now, and you’ve probably used the term yourself, but what is it, exactly, and how can it help you grow your business?

It’s helpful first to distinguish between traditional marketing and digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing vs. Digital Marketing

At their core, they’re both marketing: the act of moving goods and services from the producer to the consumer, and it can encompass all stages of the process including market research, product conception, advertising/messaging, product delivery and post-purchase activities such as reviews and referrals.

Before there was digital marketing, there was only one kind of marketing – what we now call traditional marketing.

But with the advent of the internet, the new methods for marketing necessitated a way to distinguish those methods that use the internet and its associated electronic devices and those which do not, and that is the defining difference between the two:

Traditional Marketing uses conventional methods such as printed materials, broadcast (television and radio), postal mail and telephone calls.

Digital Marketing uses online approaches in a variety of forms, such as websites, email, text messages, social media, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, referral marketing and sophisticated automation and tracking.

But wait, there’s more…

Digital marketing not only uses these various online techniques, it uses them together to create an interconnected process of engaging, tracking, measuring and optimizing the consumer’s interaction with a particular brand or company.

So even though both types are ‘marketing,’ digital marketing takes marketing to a higher tier of effectiveness, providing opportunities to engage with consumers on their terms.

And that’s where things really get exciting, because digital marketing makes it possible to create relationships with those consumers, long before they become customers.

These relationships develop out of familiarity and trust and are built because you as the marketer are able to put yourself and your product and offer help where those consumers are spending their time online: participating on social media channels, using search engines, clicking ads, reading emails, browsing websites and watching videos.

Digital Marketing Helps Consumers Find You

In some cases, the consumer is actively looking for your product by using search engines. They may not know you exist yet, but by searching for a solution to a problem or an answer to a question they have, they learn you exist when your ‘digital assets’ appear in the search results.

These assets could be content marketing pieces such as blog posts, social media pages or posts, videos, infographics, reviews left by previous customers, downloadable resources or online tools such as quizzes.

By using paid ads within the search engines and by optimizing your website content for search, you can increase the likelihood that your ads and content will show up early in their search.

Digital Marketing Helps You Find Consumers

In other cases, consumers aren’t looking for you, but if you understand the persona of your ideal customer, you can look for them and ‘show up’ where they are.

Using the advertising capability of social media platforms, for example, you can target and offer helpful content to people who match the characteristics of your targeted prospects.

And it only gets better from there…

Once these consumers begin interacting with your digital assets, you can start identifying them, tracking their behavior and ‘showing up’ more frequently where they are spending time.

For example, they may give you their email address in exchange for a downloadable resource, or they may ‘like’ your page on Facebook.

From this point, you can use email marketing, retargeting, permission-based texting and phone calls, chat bots, video marketing, free offers, and a whole host of other ‘digital marketing’ tactics to build a trusting, help-based relationship with these consumers.

But you won’t be using these tactics blindly.

As Edwards Deming, Grandfather of the Lean Startup, said…

“In God we trust; all others must bring data”

One of the main strengths of digital marketing is the ability to measure the performance of your efforts across the channels you use.

You don’t have to guess whether your marketing is effective or profitable, because you can use KPIs or Key Performance Indicators to determine what is working and what is not.

These KPIs vary depending on what is important to you and the kind of marketing you are doing.  They could be YouTube channel subscribers, email open and click rates, time spent on website pages, number of opt-ins on a landing page, likes or shares on social media posts, paid and organic traffic hits, mobile vs desktop views and of course, return on investment for all methods.

Based on the metrics you measure, you can constantly ‘course correct’ to create an ongoing, effective digital marketing strategy.

A Smart Way to Achieve Your Marketing Objectives

When used effectively, digital marketing is a smart way to achieve your marketing objectives by creating awareness of your product for your target market, establishing a trusting relationship with them, tracking their engagement with your brand, and then turning them into customers and raving fans.