Leading UK Email Marketing Agency

Top 10 benefits of email marketing

When it’s done right, email marketing is one of the most powerful marketing channels you have at your disposal.

Email has been around for more than 30 years and spans generations. Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z are all happy and comfortable using email. It’s a simple, instant, and effective way of communication. There’s plenty of new kids on the block who can do some of the same things as email but none can do as many (or do them as well) as email marketing.

Of course we’re biased, we’re an email marketing agency, but let’s take a look at the biggestbenefits email marketing brings and why it always wins…

1. It increases sales

Let’s start with the obvious one. Email marketing will increase your sales. By putting the right message in front of the right people at the right time in a beautifully designed email – that makes it easy for your subscribers to take action – you’ll easily boost your sales.

Your subscribers already like you (they wouldn’t be subscribers if they didn’t!) so you’re already
preaching to the converted. Your job is to then make it as easy as possible for these people to
convert into a sale – and email marketing is the perfect channel for doing just that.

2. Your audience really like you

Let’s follow on from the above and compare email marketing to social marketing for a second. It’s super easy to ‘Like’ a page or a post on Facebook. It takes less than a second to push the Like button. The result? Most of us end up liking a whole lot of pages. From a business point of view, there’s no way of qualifying these likes or really knowing who our fans and followers are.

Email is a different ball game. Every single person on your list has opted-in into it. They have given you their permission to contact them (and a whole bunch of them have even bought things from you already!). It’s really easy to lose sight of quite how powerful this is. The people on your email marketing list don’t just like you, they like you so much they’ve said: “Yes please! I want you to get messages from you straight to my inbox.”

3. Email helps you build better relationships and build loyalty

Following on from the above, email is a much more intimate way of communicating with your customers or people who are interested in the services you offer. This is particularly true in business to business (B2B) marketing but also extends to business to consumer (B2C) too. It’s far more personal and helps build stronger relationships.

In the best cases, your subscribers will actively look forward to hearing from you and receiving your emails. Furthermore, when you send an email marketing campaign, your subscribers will see it (unless something goes terribly wrong.) They won’t all open it but a good percentage of them will and, of that number, some of them will go on to ‘convert’ by performing the action who wanted them to do – whether that’s reading a blog article or buying a product.

With your other marketing channels, there’s no guarantee that the people you want to see your content will actually see it. With email, it’s far more likely.

4. You can get personal with email

Personalisation in email marketing isn’t anything new. For years, it’s been simple to personalise everything from subject lines through to the content of your email marketing campaigns based on the data you hold for your subscribers.

It works too. Email campaigns with a personalised subject line are 26% more likely to be opened (Source: Campaign Monitor), 74% of marketers say targeted personalisation increases customer engagement (Source: eConsultancy), and there’s an average increase of 20% in sales when using personalised experiences (Source: Monetate).

Personalised emails are more likely to be opened, engaged with, and have a better chance of driving sales. What’s more, by segmenting your database and understanding your subscribers’ preferences, you can send highly targeted and highly relevant email marketing campaigns that your subscribers will love and will have a much better chance of converting.

5. The data belongs to you

All the data you collect and use in your email marketing programmes belongs to you. Yes, it’s your responsibility to look after it, but it’s also yours. And if you want to export it (particularly useful if you’re changing email marketing platforms, for example) you can. By owning your data you have control over how it’s used and you are (mostly speaking) the only people who will be using it. This isn’t the case with social and search who use your customers’ data for their own purposes, chiefly to make a profit.

6. Send timely messages

Email is the perfect channel for delivering messages at the right time. Whether it’s any of the many automated emails you can send (like welcome, confirmation or reminder emails) or seasonal emails to push events in the calendar like Black Friday, then email marketing is your best friend.

7. Unleash powerful automation

On the automation note, sophisticated email marketing will do the heavy lifting for you – after the initial setup is complete, little manual effort is required.

Evergreen, always-on campaigns (which, once set up, always work in the background) are highly efficient ways to nurture your audience while leaving your team free to focus on more tactical sends. The best examples of automated email marketing campaigns – whether that’s welcome emails, transactional emails, thank you emails, or anything in between – harness the power of data, then combine it with creativity and commerciality to deliver results

8. Email is a great way to add value

Although email marketing is a great way to increase sales, it doesn’t always have to be about selling. Too many sales messages will quickly wear thin with your subscribers. It’s what email is a great vehicle for adding value to your customers and subscribers.

The best thing about this is – when you focus on serving the needs of the customers, enriching their lives through your content, and giving them value – you’re tapping into their emotions and you’re laying the groundwork for them becoming loyal customers and giving you repeat business. The irony is by not selling, you’ll end up driving more revenue in the long term.

9. Everything is measurable

One thing we really love about email marketing is you can measure pretty much everything. It’s why email is such a powerful marketing channel – because it’s so easy to measure performance.

Alongside the standard metrics, like open and click through rates, it’s easy to link your emails to Google Analytics and then measure how the visitors to your site from email behave in comparison to other traffic sources.

By measuring your results, evaluating them and learning from them you’ll be able to continue making stellar campaigns to wow your customers and give you the results you want to see. Analysing the results of previous campaigns then forms the basis for future campaigns.

10. Get the best ROI going

Email marketing delivers the highest ROI of any other marketing channel – digital or otherwise. For every £1 spent on email marketing, £36 is generated. With businesses facing growing pressure to account for every penny spent on marketing, being able to demonstrate return of investment is a huge benefit to email marketing.

What is an Email Marketing Agency?

An email marketing agency has the power to be your secret weapon to help you build better relationships with your customers, smash your KPIs, and launch your sales into orbit.

It’s a bold statement but one we firmly believe in.

Whereas a full service agency will offer everything from website design, content creation, search marketing, social media marketing and email marketing services, a dedicated email marketing agency will specialise purely in email marketing.

This is important because – as we mentioned earlier – email marketing delivers the highest ROI of any other marketing channel – digital or otherwise. For every £1 spent on email marketing, £36 is generated. With the rewards on offer as rich as this, it really does pay to bring in the experts.

The best email marketing agencies have a huge depth of specialist knowledge, expertise and experience, they’ll have their fingers on the industry’s pulse, and they’ll quickly be able to identify areas where you can easily improve your email marketing campaigns and tap into the ROI email brings.

Unlike email marketing service providers, who give you a platform to send your email marketing campaigns and have various different features to help optimise your email marketing, an email marketing agency works directly with you to take your email programmes to the next level.

And, because email marketing agencies aren’t tied down to a particular platform, they are technology agnostic. This means they should have the ability to work across a range of different email service providers. Alongside this, they also have access to leading email marketing technology. The best agencies will use technology – like Litmus, Validity, Mailcharts and more – to support the success of your email marketing program.

There’s so many different elements that go into making an email marketing programme. When time, resources and capacity are stretched (as we know they all too often are) it becomes a tall order to stay on top of everything you need to to make your email campaigns a success.

Trying to have engaged subscribers, to stay ahead of the latest advances in technology, to make sure your emails are delivered to the right people at the right time without errors, to drive sales…all while staying compliant with the latest data legislation is a massive job.

And staying on top of all of this is just one of the reasons why you should consider outsourcing your email marketing.

10 tips to instantly improve your email marketing

These tips will help you take your email marketing to the next level and show you how to create campaigns your customers will love.

1. Define your purpose

Your email marketing campaigns need to have a purpose otherwise it’s just marketing noise. Ask yourself: “Why am I sending this email campaign and what do I want it to do?”

You should have a clear purpose and a clear intention for what it is you want the recipient to do.

Whether it’s getting them to book a staycation, fill out a survey, or simply nurturing the relationship with quality content, signpost your purpose with clarity. With a clear purpose, you’ll know how you want your subscribers to feel when they receive an email campaign from you and what you want them to do.

2. Dive into your data

The success of your emails will, in a large way, be in direct relation to the quality of your data.

The more data you can legitimately collect on your customers the more complete a profile of them you can build. Through this, and understanding their behaviours, you’ll be able to create marketing content personalised to them by segmenting your database. This will give you the power to put the right message in front of the right people.

It’s also vital you keep your email marketing database in good health to ensure you don’t fall foul of data privacy regulations like GDPR.

Read more about the importance of email marketing data

3. Write knock-out subject line

The primary purpose of your subject line is to cut through the noise and to make people open your email. If this fails, all the hard work you’ve put into creating your great content, brilliant offer and optimised landing page will fall by the wayside.

At its very core, a great subject line will inspire people to act. It needs to be relevant, enticing, clickable, short and sweet (a maximum of 70 characters), and immediately elevate your brand’s email from the others competing for attention in the inbox.

Discover hope to write the best subject lines and preview text

4. Talk the talk and walk the walk

Your design should be on brand, should work seamlessly across all devices and email clients, and your subscribers should instantly recognise your email marketing campaigns as belonging to you.

As for content – find out what works for you. It could be short, sharp, sales-driven messaging or it could be long-form, storytelling content – often a mixture of both works well. Don’t be afraid to try different types of content to find out what works best for you.

Find out how to make your email marketing design best-in-class

5. Inspire action

A powerful call to action will define how many people engage with your email. There’s a reason it’s “call to action” and not “make them act.” You have to invite your subscribers in. You have to pull, not push.

It needs to be immediate, present, relevant and personalised. In a nutshell, you need to find a compelling way to tell your customers to ‘Do this now!’

Learn what makes the best email marketing calls to action

6. Stick the landing

A landing page isn’t part of the email itself but is an essential part of email marketing.

Good landing pages are clear, they don’t make the user think, they are easy to navigate, and they have a very clear message and action to take – and the content should work in unison with the email rather than simply repeating what they’ve already read.

Like the anatomy of an email, a landing page has to be created to make your customers do what you want them to do. Make life easy for them and they stand a much higher chance of converting.

7. Nail the delivery

You need to make sure your email works on multiple devices but also in different email clients. There’s nothing worse than giving your customers a bad experience and more than 90% (Source: Adobe) won’t bother trying to read something if it doesn’t display properly.

Emails sent out with mistakes look unprofessional, can cause reputational damage, and can be reported as spam – impacting the delivery of future campaigns.

Deliverability is far more mainstream now than we’ve ever seen before and – not having the right configuration in place – is something that’s affecting all senders. It can have a significant negative effect on email marketing programmes and, without the correct set up, can lead to your emails ending up in spam folders or not being delivered at all.

Discover everything you need to know about email marketing deliverability

8. Find the right time

A really common question we’re always asked is ‘What day and time should we send the email?’ The answer is it differs from industry and industry, season to season, and even company to company.

One place to start is by looking at your Google Analytics and identifying when your key customers are online and engaging with the site naturally. Aim to send at a time when they are online and potentially more receptive.

Finding the right time to send an email isn’t an exact science yet – and the perfect time to send simply doesn’t exist. However, through a combination of common sense, historical performance and industry trends, you can find the best time to send your emails, often with surprising and dramatic results.

9. Test, test, test…then test again

Testing works with everything from finding the right time to send, to finding the best subject line and even to finding the best performing content.

There are many different ways to test an email and equally many other ways to measure success.

What’s important is to isolate one variable at a time in order to get a meaningful result. For example, you could run an A/B split test by changing the subject line of an email but you would have to send both emails out at the same time to make it a fair test.

Equally, if you want to test sending at different times, make sure everything else in the email remains constant. It’s also good practice to keep things fresh and experiment with mixing things up – while consistency is key it doesn’t hurt to try new things especially as consumer habits change.

Learn how email marketing testing can help optimise your results

10. Measure performance

Email is such a powerful marketing channel to use because it’s so easy to measure performance. Alongside the standard metrics, like click through rates, it’s easy to link your emails to Google Analytics and then measure how the visitors to your site from email behave in comparison to other traffic sources.

To come full circle, go back to your purpose and ask yourself what a conversion looks like to you, what success means, and identify how you’re going to measure ROI.

By measuring your results, evaluating them and learning from them you’ll be able to continue making stellar campaigns to wow your customers and give you the results you want to see. Analysing the results of previous campaigns then forms the basis for future campaigns.

Why outsource your email marketing

If you know your email marketing program should be performing better but lack the time or expertise to give it the dedication it deserves then every day you put off making the decision to outsource is a day lost. And you could actually be harming your brand by sending email marketing campaigns you feel don’t live up to your expectations.

From a practical point of view, if your email marketing has become an afterthought or a rushed job, if the capacity of your team is stretched, if you know you should be doing more but don’t know where to start, then all the indicators point to it being the right time to outsource.

An email marketing agency will identify the best ways for you to reach your goals and put a strategy in place to make sure you get there.

Here’s why you should consider outsourcing your email marketing management:

1. Design tailored to fit your business

Email templates are great and absolutely serve a purpose. But, if you want to really stand out from the crowd and let your brand shine, you need to go beyond a ‘one size fits all’ template and start sending email campaigns that exude quality craftsmanship and your customers will love.

By outsourcing your email marketing design you can increase engagement and conversions, make use of cutting-edge techniques like video in email, and utilise a bespoke suite of email designs (made specifically for you) that will keep you ahead of the competition.

2. Data management made easy

Data management can be a minefield and failure to manage email marketing data correctly can
have dire consequences.

From advanced segmentation through to best practice data management, an email marketing agency can help keep your database in great shape and ensure it gives you the results you’re looking for.

For example, regular data audits help to consolidate multiple email marketing lists, which not only helps to manage data more efficiently, in many cases, it reduces the amount being spent on email marketing platforms (who charge by number of records, not number of unique contacts).

Along with consolidating the data, data can be ‘cleaned’ by suppressing inactive contacts. This reduces ongoing costs, protects data integrity, and improves deliverability. What’s more, outsourcing your email marketing can help you develop a growth strategy that’s effective and compliant with the latest data regulations like GDPR and ePrivacy.

3. Deliverability you can rely on

It’s so easy to concentrate on all the glamorous aspects of email marketing – the design, the content, the smart segmentation – that email deliverability (or the art of ensuring your messages reach your subscribers) is often overlooked.

When you consider, on average, 16% of all emails sent fail to be delivered it makes sense to do everything possible to ensure deliverability rates stay high.

From domain authentication to improving sender reputation, outsourcing can protect your brand, improve your email deliverability and ensure your emails continue to successfully reach the inbox rather than the spam folder.

4. Expert insight, analysis and reporting

It’s easy to run basic reports from most ESPs (email service providers). Where outsourcing goes further is to help you find the ‘so what?’ form your email marketing results.

For example, at Jarrang, we won’t just tell you what happened, we’ll use this insight together with our industry expertise to provide the story behind the data.

We use Google Analytics alongside the email marketing software to provide comprehensive reporting, which includes a range of different data (from open rates through to device usage and conversions) to help you make better, more informed decisions when it comes to your future email marketing. We then use our expertise to act on our analysis, make recommendations and provide commentary on how to improve future campaigns, spot trends, and tailor your approach.

5. Know how you stack up against the competition

Benchmarking in email marketing is there to provide guidance as to what is an industry- accepted standard and give an indication as to where your company stands in comparison.

When used appropriately, benchmarking figures can highlight where you rank in terms of industry competitors. This information can then help you to generate ideas as to what you need to do to catch up, or in an ideal scenario, work out what you are doing right and how to stay ahead.

Email marketing experts can help you understand this to a better degree so you can see how you stack up and are performing against your competitors.

6. Make the best use of your time, resources & capacity

You and your team are busy people. Marketing doesn’t ever stand still and there’s always the next job to tackle. We see it all the time; teams take on too much and become stretched. Results start to suffer and stress starts to build.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

By calling in the experts to help you will free up your time, increase your capacity and get more from your resources.

7. Keep on top of the latest trends and innovations

From AMP to GDPR, the email landscape is ever evolving – it’s hard to keep up! Keeping up with the latest trends and innovations is a sure-fire way to keep your email marketing campaigns fresh and engaging while helping you stand out from your competitors.

Whether it’s championing interactivity within email or unleashing the benefits of hyper-personalisation, a dedicated email marketing services agency will make sure you’re leading the pack.

8. Easily scale your email marketing maturity

An expert team can help you take your email marketing to the next level of sophistication. A smart, sophisticated email marketing programme will keep your engagement rates high, help you build lasting relationships with your subscribers, and boost sales. From personalisation to automation the experts can help take your email marketing – and the results it generates – to the next level.

Ultimately, the decision on how you manage your email marketing, whether you keep it in-house or whether you outsource it, is yours to make.

And if you do make the decisions to outsource, find a partner who can help you:

• Create, send and deliver better email marketing campaigns.
• Save time and money.
• Better utilise your resources.
• Build better relationships with your customers and subscribers.
• Turbocharge your ROI.
• Get the edge over your competition.

Why Jarrang is your email marketing partner of choice

We live, breathe, and love email. For us it is – and always has been – the most exciting marketing channel.

We’re email designers, developers, data analysts, content creators, geeks, and superfans.

Sit down for a coffee with any one of our team and they’ll chat to you for hours about all the beautiful intricacies about email marketing – because sharing our love for email with our clients is what we do.

Supporting you, surprising you, and delighting you with what email marketing can do is what makes us tick.

And we know, from years of experience, that email needs expertise.

Email seems easy. Platform vendors promise that email is easy. Yet as a digital direct channel the mix of skills needed to become an expert in email is wide ranging – covering the full spectrum of art and science:

• Data logic
• Strategy (and objective planning)
• Creative & Content
• Segmentation, Targeting & Personalisation
• Campaign and In-life multiple stage sends
• Automation and Trigger Sends
• Reporting, Analytics & Trend Measurement
• Testing & Optimisation
• Technology: Send platform, deliverability and render management

And this doesn’t even take into account the time and resources needed to get the job done properly. It takes time and thinking space across planning, build and reporting. Rushing risks poor performance at best and errors at worst.

Our sole purpose is to deliver industry leading emails for our clients. You’ve found a partner that can provide you the capacity and expertise to increase revenue, profitability and customer lifetime value for your business year after year.

From luxury hotel collections to hedge funds, we work with a wide range of businesses across all sectors. We give them our expertise and provide them with the capacity they need to create email marketing campaigns that fuel growth and deliver a significant return on investment.

Tell us what you need and let us give you the time and expertise to make your life easier.

Professional and credible service is a given for any company to succeed. To stand out in the inbox your emails also need to inform, entertain and have an authentic voice. Showing your culture and what makes you tick behind the scenes helps customers trust you and in time provide their loyalty.

We understand this. We live this. So, if you’re still not sure whether to invest your time in a conversation yet, take a look at our Vision, Mission and Values.