Why Email Marketing is Still Alive and Well

Email marketing may seem like a lost art to some. A product of a bygone era before everybody and their dog started using social media. Those unfortunate people might think that email marketing is no longer something that can attract customers, but those people would be wrong. While social media and mobile marketing are getting all of the attention these days, email marketing is just as useful as ever, and can actually be used to enhance social media marketing efforts. Here are just a few of the reasons email marketing systems and white label email marketing are still worth running.

Since this type of marketing has been flying under the radar over the past few years, it will be useful to first define what it is. It is the simple act of sending an email to people on a list in the hopes that they will buy your product or service. This usually takes the form of an ad or a newsletter. But this simple definition is what has led to many people proclaiming that email marketing is dead. Many people think that today, when a person receives an email, if it isn’t from somebody they know, it immediately gets marked as spam. While this is true for some situations, email systems still work great at establishing customer trust and loyalty.

Those who decry this type of marketing as dead seem to be missing an important distinction between two different types of emails. There are both transactional and direct emails used in marketing. The emails that tend to get ignored and marked as spam are the direct ones. These are sent with the sole purpose of communicating a promotional message, such as a sale. These are not the best at establishing customer trust.

However, the transactional type offers a much better chance to gain the trust and loyalty of your customers. Transactional emails are emails sent in response to an action taken by the customer. If you’ve ever purchased something from Amazon, then you have received a transactional email when they send you your receipt or shipment information. Since these emails have such a high open rate, they mark a particularly good opportunity for engaging customers with other promotional messages.

As mentioned above, this type of marketing may be used to enhance other marketing venues such as social media. But how can a seemingly old-fashioned marketing system help compete with the new hotness of social media? While social media is great for attracting people to your brand, email is the tool that allows you to turn those “likes” into actual sales. It turns the conversation that started with social media into a transaction by moving the conversation to the personal confines of a customer’s inbox.