Are you among the thousands of businesses who encountered marketing difficulties during the COVID-19 pandemic? Did you know that using email marketing can help your business despite the current global economic recession?
More people are checking their emails during the pandemic than ever before. The email marketing open rate saw an increase of 21.5% this 2020, while the conversion rate reached a hike of 15.09%.
The reason for these increases is mainly due to the home quarantine practice, which made people turn to online shopping and check marketing emails for product updates and potential discounts.
Don’t let the hard times disrupt your business. Read on to learn more about email marketing and the strategies you can take to benefit from this marketing channel, even during the pandemic.
Why Use Email Marketing?
Email marketing still works even during the current economic downturn. Here are five of the many reasons why you should leverage it for your business:
It Is Easily Accessible
Outdoor or print marketing strategies have become insignificant during the quarantine and social distancing period. This crisis allowed email marketing to get to the spotlight since most people now have at least one active email address, which they can access anytime through web or mobile.
It Has Consistent High ROI and Conversions
Despite the rise of various marketing channels, email marketing remains the best and most effective sales strategies.
It has the highest return on investment (ROI), among other marketing channels, in the past 10 years. It also has the highest conversion rate for purchases done in response to promotional messages.
It Is Easy to Integrate With Other Marketing Strategies
Emails are so versatile that you can use them to reinforce your other marketing efforts.
You can easily attach clickable social media links to your emails and direct your customers to follow you there. You can also use it to promote your webinars and other online events.
It Is Easy Personalize
By using a data-driven email targeting strategy, you can personalize your emails according to your customer’s profile and behavioral patterns. This strategy builds trust and a more personal relationship with them
It Creates More Traffic and Improves Brand Awareness
You can use email to introduce your brand’s values, mission, products, and services to your customers. It gives you a chance to customize your message and promote your business according to your target’s preferences.
Emails also allow you to show your customers a glimpse of your website content, including your blog posts. As a result, you will garner more website traffic when they click on the titles to read more of your content.
10 Email Marketing Tips During Pandemic
You have to be more sensitive in understanding your customers, especially in these times of crisis. Here are some tips to help you create better email marketing strategies during the pandemic:
Avoid Overselling
The pandemic season encouraged more people to support and help one another. Creating an aggressive marketing campaign won’t do you any good.
Identify and understand your target customer’s current needs, problems, and goals. Let them know that you are there to help them during the crisis, instead of directly selling them anything.
Craft emails that can help ease your customer’s anxiousness and worries. In return, they will have trust and confidence in your brand, which can lead to sales later on.
Send COVID-19 Related Updates, but in Moderation
Shifting from promoting your brand to educating your customers about the current crisis is a good strategy. However, they may not appreciate it if businesses are flooding them with too many pandemic-related emails.
If you are not an official news and health organization, there’s no need to send COVID-19 updates from time-to-time. Instead, create pandemic-related emails only if they are directly relevant to your brand or business.
Keep It Short and Readable
Like other types of content, emails should be short and readable. Consumers would rather delete your email than to absorb long and tedious blocks of text.
Write simple emails with short sentences and paragraphs and minimal text blocks. This way, they can easily read and understand your message despite their short attention span, and it will also motivate them to respond.
Create Clear and Compelling Subject Lines
Your subject line can either make your customer open your email or ignore and delete it.
A deceptive or click-bait subject line often annoys the consumers, so avoid using them. Instead, create a clear, descriptive, and compelling message that will convince your readers to click it because your email is worth reading.
Use Email Segmentation Strategies
Mass marketing isn’t the way to go anymore.
As said earlier, you can personalize according to your target audience’s demographics and behavioral patterns. The reason is that not every email is worth reading for every subscriber or target consumer.
Tailor and personalize your emails using email segmentation. Segmenting your emails will allow you to know and understand the right message and content they would like to read according to their profile, needs, values, desires, goals, interests, and other characteristics.
For example, if you are an online clothing store, you may send a personalized email to your subscribers who are in quarantine and work-from-home set-up and offer them outfits that will fit their situation. Likewise, you can send a different message to the front-liners who are likely in need of proper yet comfortable gears for their field works.
Add an Irresistible Call to Action
It’s great if you’re able to retain their attention throughout your email. The next thing to do is ask yourself about your goals or desired results in the email.
What do you want your audience to do after reading your message?
Do you want your audience to go to your website? Make a purchase? Follow your social media accounts? Sign on your newsletters?
Create a call to action based on your desired outcomes. Make sure that it is clear and convincing enough that they will take action immediately.
Track and Analyze Results
Check the performance of your email marketing strategies. Determine your email metrics according to the following:
- Deliverability rate (did your message end up in the receiver’s inbox or spam folder?)
- Open rate (the number of people who opened or viewed your email)
- Clickthrough rate (the number of people who clicked at least one of the links in your email)
- Conversion rate (the number of people who did your desired action, such as making a purchase)
- Bounce rate (the number of emails that failed to reach the customer’s inbox)
- Unsubscribe rate (the number of people who unsubscribe from your email list)
- List growth rate (the growth percentage of your email)
After analyzing your metrics, find out your strengths and shortcomings. Revise your email marketing strategies according to the results.
Boost your email marketing strategies now!
Although COVID-19 has challenged millions of businesses and individuals globally, good marketers know how to create marketing campaigns that can make their customers happy, even in times of crisis.
When it comes to effective digital marketing, email marketing is definitely on the list. If you’re not sure about your strategies, you can hire a trustworthy digital marketer to help you boost your brand online.
How are your digital marketing strategies doing during the pandemic? Let us know your insights in the comment section below!
