Email Marketing & Navigating the Marketing Funnel
Email Marketing - "Old Reliable"
Email marketing has been around for what seems like ages. In fact, the first email marketing campaign was executed on the "pre-internet" known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) only seven years after electronic mail was created in 1971 by Raymond Tomlinson (Phrasee). Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager for a bona fide Digital Equipment Company (DEC) sent the first spam email to 320 users to promote a new DEC product to the west coast market, where their business was lacking. Below is Thuerk's 1978 e-marketing email that resulted in $12 million dollars in sales (bettermarketing):
"I knew I was pushing the envelope. I thought of it as e-marketing. We wanted to reach as many people as possible to let them know about our new product. It was coming out Dec. 20 of that year, and we didn’t want to send invitations.” - Gary Thuerk
If you are a typical internet user, it is likely you will find a large some of promotional emails in your inbox today. With the growth of modern marketing channels such as social media and SMS to reach users; you may be curious as to why companies are still making an effort reach out through email. The answer is simple: it is an element of the Marketing ecosystem that drives the whole of customer acquisition, activation and retention. More information on the importance of reaching out to your target market and user personalization can be found on a previous blog on Inbound Strategy.
What's New?
Although e-mail marketing seems old, it is a tool that has evolved with technology. From transferring from ARPANET to the Internet, and now from manually managing campaigns to using software to do so. While the stats of Thuerks email could not be evaluated, new software allows marketers to understand their market to curate and improve campaigns with stats on open-rate, click-though rate (CLTR), and number of unsubscribes. The value of this tool holds strong; with an ROI of $36 to every $1 spent in 2022 (litmus). Altogether, e-mail marketing software is a tool to improve overall effectiveness and efficiency of campaigns.
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In addition to e-marketing software, the use of automation can be used to automatically customize e-mail marketing campaigns. Tags, custom fields, segmenting contacts, and send time are are elements that can be automated to personalize campaigns. Changes made to automation can be made by looking at the metrics provided by e-mail marketing software.
The Lay of the Land
A major element of modern e-mail marking is the use of links. Needless to say, a link to a campaign's landing page is essential in any digital campaign, as it the gateway to a call to action (CTA) when a user is given the opportunity to click these links. It is a valuable element in converting visitors to leads. This can be done by understanding what makes a webpage user friendly. A vital part of creating a good landing page is understanding both UX and UI design. UX stands for user experience, which involves the technicality of the website, and UI stands for user interface which involves the graphic design and visuals on the page. Below are a few key elements in creating a good landing page (ConvertKit):
Looking Forward
However outdated e-mail may seem, it is one of the original tools in the Marketing Ecosystem that has evolved with time and technology. While newer, original marketing tools will proceed to emerge, sending personalized e-mails by automation will be a tool that upholds to help drive other gears in the system directly to the user. Through the use of software and understanding users, marketers can continue to gather insights and curate content to users to encourage a CTA and guide them down the marketing funnel.