Digital marketing has been characterized by using the different web tools available on the Internet to communicate with people and organizations in your environment. Emails and email marketing are part of these tools and although they are one of the oldest, they continue to be an important piece within the inbound marketing methodology.
What characterizes emails?
Emails are characterized by their ability to send, in addition to text, any type of document (images, videos, audios, etc.). Also, you can insert these elements as audiovisual supports within the same email, thus creating a complete piece of content. This method of presenting emails has been widely used in email marketing since it allows for more enriched communication and allows messages to be transmitted in different formats.
Its ease of use and speed, in terms of the short time it takes to send and receive an email, has allowed the majority of companies, institutions and Internet users to use email as their main means of communication. Electronic messages travel to their destination almost instantly and one of their greatest advantages is that you can get a response in the same way.
On the other hand, emails have a longer useful life compared to other marketing channels, such as social networks. This is because people take much longer to view their emails and most of the time, there is a motivation behind them to open and read them. In this sense, the possibilities that companies have of being read and taken into account increase. According to McKinsey & Company, email is 40 times more effective than a social network in attracting potential customers (leads).
The importance of email marketing
Aware of the boom in the exchange of information through emails ( despite new digital media and their impressive technologies), email marketing strives to make the most of the presence of emails in consumers’ daily lives. Hubspot, a pioneer company in the area, in its objective to demonstrate how efficient emails are to carry out inbound marketing strategies, reveals that:
- There are 4.3 billion email accounts worldwide, which send 196 billion emails daily.
- 91% of consumers check their emails every day
- For every $1 that companies invest in email marketing, the average return on investment is $40.
Based on these statistics, we can affirm that there are many people who use and check their inbox daily as if it were a habit. In addition, they can give us an idea of how current this communication channel continues to be and the potential it offers within inbound marketing, even though social networks and blogs are preferred by brands.
Therefore, it does not surprise us how Email marketing has become a demanding and very important service for companies, in their effort to relate more with their potential customers. Inbound marketing specialists rely on this data to incorporate email marketing into their methodology since these platforms act as prodigious channels to establish much more comprehensive customer service.
Through email marketing, the inbound methodology gives credibility to its philosophy: customers are the ones who have the power to decide what they want to see, since people can subscribe to a particular blog or content to receive via email, this information. On the other hand, email is a channel that companies can take over. While Google and Facebook may change the way they index search results and present content, email companies will always have a 1:1 relationship with the people who receive it.
Inbound marketing methodology
The inbound marketing methodology consists of 4 stages, attract, convert, close and delight. The third and fourth stages are the ones we will pay more attention to in the next few lines. To take a brief walk through this sequence of strategies, let’s start at the beginning. Attracting is that stage in which companies create valuable content for their ideal readers, who, attracted by the content disseminated, can become sales opportunities.
After visitors to a website become potential customers for companies, a closing process begins where the marketing and sales departments are in charge of completing a successful product or service acquisition. Delight constitutes that stage where companies, to retain their buyers, send them more personalized material to their emails with advice, recommendations and any educational text in general, which allows them to continue relating to the industry and the content offered by the company. In these last two stages, the data that your potential clients provide you plays a fundamental role since it is your passport to continue interacting with them.
Email marketing to close
Since inbound marketing promotes the natural and spontaneous attraction of buyers (by providing relevant and useful content for them), phone calls and emails with price lists, offers and promotions are basically left for last (unlike what happened in traditional marketing) and when the client, through a form or a subscription, provides their data so that the companies continue sending more information, which in this case, is based specifically on the services and products that it offers.
In this sense, The closing stage is where emails and email marketing itself come into play for the first time, since they are (as we have already mentioned before) an effective tool to create a much more efficient relationship with customers. If your leads decide to receive newsletters to their email, links with downloadable material and more specific information about your services and products from your company, this means that they are in the decision stage of the buyer’s journey and that they need to be convinced of which It will be your best choice.
In this phase, you should also use email to clarify doubts, analyze the needs that arise within your target audience, listen to their criticism and recommendations. An email is a first step to establishing a much more pleasant relationship with your clients, since from there, you can jump to a phone call, where personalized attention acquires great value for your potential buyers.
Email marketing to delight
Pleasing or delighting is an important task with which inbound marketing puts an end to its methodology. This stage is very important in creating lasting relationships with customers and to do so, it also makes use of emails. According to this methodology, customers who are pleased with the attention and services offered by a company become its promoters. If with your content, you attract the right audience, then your promoters will also help you attract the right attention, since they make up the ideal buyers that you need and therefore, they will recommend you in circles of friends who, like them, are interested for what you offer.
In that sense, pleasing your customers is a critical stage of inbound marketing because it is your way of taking those customers and turning them into promoters. Among the three pillars of pleasing are innovating, communicating and educating. Email marketing comes into play in each of them, as they allow you to stay in touch with your customers (in a much more personal way), remain educated on topics that interest them, and encourage them to engage more with the value proposition you offer. , giving them downloadable materials that they can use to continue stimulating their learning process. People do not promote products or services in which they do not trust, so through email marketing you can develop that trust that you so need to boost your business.
Email marketing plays a very important role in the inbound marketing methodology because it allows companies to approach a successful sale. It is the preferred channel to generate quality customer service, where the customer feels trusted, appreciated and listened to by another. It is the time that companies dedicate to their potential customers, to boost their purchasing decisions, convert them into promoters and provide them with a personalized relationship.
