Is Email Marketing Still A “Thing”?
Recent studies have shown that email marketing is still the primary method used by marketers to promote brands and products, especially in B2B marketing. This is not to say that the pursuit of other efforts as part of the marketing mix are gone, ineffective, or should not be employed – to the contrary – but email marketing continues to lead the pack. And there are good reasons for it.
The reasons marketers are putting so much effort into email marketing are varied. Some have to do with the virtues of email marketing itself, while others have to do with the shortcomings of other common outreach tactics. The bottom line is this: Email marketing provides great ROI.
Here are some of the main reasons marketers invest considerable time, efforts, and other resources in email marketing:
- Inexpensive and scalable compared to other methods of outbound marketing and advertising
- Less intrusive than phone calls, pop-up ads, etc.
- Preferred communication method by most
- Makes two-way interaction as easy as pushing ‘Reply’
- Allows for personalized and targeted messaging
- Can be deployed quickly with a very short lead-time, and even in real-time when needed
- Abundance of email marketing service providers
- Large reach – practically everyone has an email address
- Can be read on desktops and mobile devices
- Relatively easy to create and deliver campaigns
- Response and interaction can be measured, tracked, and analyzed
- Marketing automation has gone mainstream
- Versatile: text, images, videos, links, files, collateral, and calls to action (CTA) can be included
- Generates traffic to website and helps with SEO
Marketers know that email marketing is great for brand awareness and customer acquisition, with virtually the lowest customer acquisition cost (CAC) of any other methods. However, because of that, almost everyone uses it… So how do you stand out? How do you rise above the noise? How do you leverage email marketing to get the most out of it? There are ways to do that – More about those techniques in future newsletters.
If you want email marketing to be part of your marketing mix, or if you’d like to make your current email marketing efforts more effective and beneficial, we are happy to talk to you about it. Just call us or send us a quick note here.
Duke Merhavy, MBA, Ph.D.
President & Chief Marketing Officer
Outstanding Marketing Leadership Award Goes to Duke Merhavy, MBA, Ph.D.
We are incredibly proud to announce that our very own President & Chief Marketing Officer, Dr. Duke Merhavy, received the Outstanding Marketing Leadership Award at the Marketing 2.0 Conference held in Las Vegas earlier this month.
This global gathering of brand builders and marketers brought some of the brightest and wisest marketing minds from all around the world together under one roof to deliberate and discuss the future of marketing and advertising.
Dr. Duke Merhavy has been at the forefront of the international Fractional CMO trend, helping to shape this unique role and establish the standards, processes, and best practices for utilizing Fractional CMOs by small- and medium-sized businesses everywhere. In addition to receiving the prestigious Outstanding Marketing Leadership Award, Duke moderated and made significant contributions to a panel discussion named “Customer Retention, Loyalty, and Advocacy” at the conference.
You can read more about Dr. Duke Merhavy here.
“I am so honored to have received the Outstanding Marketing Leadership Award, and I really enjoyed meeting other marketing professionals, chatting about our industry, and listening to the other panelists.
It’s an exciting and dynamic time for the marketing profession! I’m glad to have made the connections I did, and also, that my experience lent some insights to those at the conference.”
– Dr. Duke Merhavy
What Is Fractional CMO & Marketing?
Fractional CMO & Marketing is ‘Your Outsourced Marketing Department’ when you need expert marketing leadership and marketing services to accelerate growth and improve profitability, but you’re not quite ready to hire a full-time Chief Marketing Officer or your own marketing department.
Our unique arrangement is the most efficient, innovative, and cost-effective formula for you. Click on the image to the left to watch a short video.
We Help When You Need To:
- Generate more of the right kind of leads
- Close more sales faster
- Get repeat sales
- Formulate a more effective message
- Produce powerful sales tools
- Establish brand awareness, recognition, and preference
- Differentiate your brand from the competition
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Develop lasting relationships with customers
- Introduce new products
Marketing Lingo: Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is the process and activities focused on developing the relationship an organization has with potential customers, as well as current customers.
Lead nurturing marketing efforts that cultivate, promote, and foster a bond between the organization and its audience are invaluable. These efforts should provide the recipients with information about the organization’s offerings, and help them move along the ‘buyer’s journey’.
Well planned and executed lead nurturing activities will provide the specific information needed by prospects at the particular stage of the ‘buyer’s journey’, and in the form that is most suitable for them.
Lastly, lead nurturing is a strategic effort. It must be viewed, planned, and pursued with long-term goals in mind. Therefore, lead nurturing endeavors are most suitable to offerings where trust is important, long-term relationships are valued, and when buying decisions are weighed more carefully.
* ‘Marketing Lingo’ is a regular column in which we define, or otherwise explain, terms often used in marketing but not necessarily correctly or properly by some
You Can’t Wait Anymore to Have a Mobile-Friendly Website
Mobile is Material
The over 5 billion users who access the internet on their mobile device and make up over 50% of WWW-bound traffic are a force to be reckoned with. It’s not 2001 anymore – and we don’t need a desktop computer to have a satisfactory web-browsing experience. Smartphones and touch screens have made visiting the World Wide Web on the go easier than ever… but if your company’s online home hasn’t kept up, it’s a good bet that visitors won’t spend more than a few seconds there. It isn’t wise to frustrate away any potential customers to your website, so now is the time to make sure no matter what the device, anyone who types in your URL will be able to comfortably see and read all about your business.
Mobile-First Means…
Remember those 5 billion users we mentioned? Well (as we see it), thanks to social media and shopping websites / apps that were designed mobile-in-mind from the get-go – also known as “mobile-first” – most of those potential customers are used to seamless scanning and navigating online. If expectations of a smooth experience are not met, it can cause your online visitors to go to a competitor post-haste.
If your company is new, you’ll have a much easier go of it, since you can make sure your website is mobile-friendly from the beginning. Are you an established business, with a website created before mobile became omnipresent, just now cultivating an on-the-go existence? Then you will have more to do, but it is workable and worth your time, effort, and expense.
4 Tips for Mobile Design
- Understand Your Users
Your product offerings must be mindful of what prospects and customers want, and your online presence is no different. You might think from all the time spent poring over your website content that you have a good idea what should be there and how it should look, but the truth is you’re probably too close and invested to see what needs to be done. Also, when you visit a website, you may be looking for a different experience than those you want to engage with your company. This is why gaining perspective is crucial.
The critical eye required comes from a Fractional CMO (who will guide you in best practices) and observing mobile use to understand user perspectives and know their pain points. What are the goals of your web visitors? How are they trying to accomplish them? Researching these questions will allow you to note difficulties that can be tackled in your quest to become mobile-first. A customer journey map may also prove useful when you redesign your website, as it is a graphic portrayal of a user’s encounter. In 2021, the Baymard Institute found that almost 70% of shoppers online simply deserted their shopping carts, after spending time piling products in it. If you know this is happening, you must be wondering why, knowing the time and energy spent on choosing products, that the cart never moves to the checkout process. Even you have probably chosen items from an online merchant and never completed the purchase.
- Keep It Simple
Simple equals user-friendly. There’s much less screen space on a mobile device when compared to a desktop or laptop, and for this reason, it’s vital to get to the point quickly. If a visitor doesn’t need to know certain information, don’t waste the space on it. Also, the less pages on your mobile site, the easier it will be for others.
That doesn’t mean your mobile website needs to be dull or uninteresting though. There are numerous examples of stripped down but effective ones, such as Etsy, BuzzFeed, and Shutterfly. While these examples might not represent what your business does, you can still learn some important lessons: Etsy emphasizes searches and categories, BuzzFeed makes it easy for users to find subjects of interest, and Shutterfly is very visually appealing and finding what you need is simple.
Your mobile website navigation menu should be simple, transparent, and natural for users. Unlike your desktop site, which can not only take advantage of a roomy set of choices but also your choice of position (header or sidebar), your mobile online home must be more parsimonious with space and layout. Many opt for the “hamburger menu”, an icon with 3 lines that doesn’t take much space and when activated shows users a fly-in set of options.
Responsive design may be the best way for your business to optimize mobile viewing. These websites change content according to the type of device the visitor is using. In contrast to making a completely separate website for mobile, or having a web designer create completely new pages, this is a money-saving option and requires less company resources to bring to fruition. If you decide to go with this alternative, please be sure to carefully plan and test your website’s responsive design.
- Fast Loading Is Paramount
No matter how much time you spend on designing the perfect mobile website, it won’t mean much if it doesn’t load quickly. Google found that if a website takes 3 seconds to load, 32% of users attempting to visit will abandon their plans. And prospective visitors aren’t the only ones to take action – Google will drop down in its organic searches a slow-loading mobile website.
Though we are focusing on mobile in this article, it’s worth noting that any site accessed from any kind of device that is slow to load will bring issues. We encourage you to remember your online home must appear before visitors as quickly as possible, and testing it after updates will ensure you can find any speed-of-loading problems and rectify them quickly. No one really wants the content they worked hard on to be cut from a website, but if doing so saves a few seconds of loading time, you’re likely to see longer session times, lower bounce rates, and higher conversion.
- Cost of Interacting With Your Website
Whether a site user is just reading information about your company or trying to learn and understand the services you offer, physical and mental effort is needed. Tapping screens or swiping is a bit different from clicking a mouse and using an actual keyboard.
Forms are especially vulnerable to this phenomenon. Haven’t you had a frustrating experience trying to fill out a poorly-designed-for-mobile form? We know we have! Save your visitors the annoyance by keeping forms concise, and ask only for the necessities. After all, once they fill out and submit their information, you can email or call them later for more details. Tiny text, obnoxious pop-ups, and overly intricate menus? Yep, we’ve been irritated by those common mobile website offenders too!
Smartphones and tablets have brought a new reality, and if you haven’t made sure your website is optimized for these mobile devices, now is the time! Fractional CMO & Marketing can help you usher in this modern era, and ensure visitors to your website can quickly find what they need.
What Do You Need to Know? And How Do You Find It Out?
In March’s “Marketing Lingo” article, we defined the difference between qualitative and quantitative data. This month, we are sharing 3 questions to help you decide which type of information you need to answer your organization’s burning marketing questions.
- Why are you conducting this research? Is it to investigate a theory or to test opinions?
If you want to test an assumption, a quantitative research undertaking should give you a sample size sufficient to find whether it’s correct or mistaken. On the other hand, qualitative research, featuring open-ended questions, will give specific and useful information without pinning participants to a “yes” or “no”.
- Do you want to understand why participants have particular viewpoints, or do you just need to know what their opinion is and how popular certain attitudes are?
Qualitative research is best to glean how people think and their motivations, while quantitative will give you measurable data on particular information shared by members of your study group. If you need to measure, classify, or evaluate results statistically, you need numbers and definitive answers – and that means quantitative studies.
- Do you want to make more generalized conclusions about the larger market for your products and services, or would personal responses from individuals be more useful?
Quantitative research will provide you with beneficial data, that can be looked at numerically, about the population at large. Qualitative studies can provide responses with more nuanced and refined answers, but what you learn may not be applicable to the populace at large.
Next month’s “Marketing Lingo” article will delve into primary and secondary research, which will be a fitting encore, considering how intertwined qualitative and quantitative data are with how you obtain information to be used when conducting studies to gather intelligence before making marketing decisions.
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