3 reasons you need a great email marketing programme in 2018

January is a time when good old fashioned common sense gets packaged up as the answer to all that ails you. The same is true in business. If you haven't seen a post telling you 2018 is the year you will 'dominate', 'crush it' or 'destroy it' then you've probably been living under a rock.

While dominating, crushing and destroying aren't the words we'd use, the simple truth is the start of the year is a great time to plan where you want your business to go in the next 12 months. And once you've figured that out, next in line is drawing your map of how to get there.

For any business looking to grow, marketing will form an essential part of this route map, and having a great email marketing programme should be a core component of the marketing activities you're planning. In fact, we'd say it's the special ingredient you need to fuel your growth and power the journey along the route you've mapped out.Here's why...

It will help you build great relationships with your customers.

Never forget the customer is the hero in your story, not you. Your role in their story is to be their mentor and guide; you're the Yoda to their Luke Skywalker and your job is to help them overcome a problem they're facing. An effective email marketing programme is one of the most powerful ways to build brilliant relationships with your customers and make them feel loved, perfectly positioning you as one of their valued 'mentors'.

This matters because, when your customers love you, they'll stay with you, they'll tell others how great you are and they will be the catalyst for your growth. Put an email marketing strategy in place that helps you build, nourish and grow these relationships.

It will make your marketing smarter.

Marketing used to be like a summer blockbuster, full of dazzling effects and bombast. The school of thought was to throw everything at it, make it loud and watch the money roll in. Thankfully, the best marketing is now much different. It's niche, it's targeted and it's crafted for the individual rather than a mass market. For email marketing programmes, this is where marketing automation comes in.

For me, the future of email marketing revolves around automation and a brand's ability to harness the power of data, then combine it with creativity and commerciality to deliver results. This is where the best automated email journeys come from. And it works. We set up shopping cart abandonment emails for St Eval Candle Company (these are automatic emails triggered when a customer places an item in their shopping cart but doesn't complete the purchase) and the results they saw were incredible.

As St Eval Candle Company managing director, Ian Greaves, says: "We've seen a 2,161% return on investment for directly attributable revenue in under 12 months from the shopping cart abandonment emails Jarrang have set up for us."

It will deliver a return on investment.

The return on investment (ROI) mentioned above isn't just exclusive to one of our clients, it's a trend we see across the board, in a large part due to the fact the recipients of your emails tend to be either people who have bought from you before or expressed an interest in hearing from you.

Sharon Sandercock, from Isles of Scilly Travel, told us for every £1 they spend on email marketing with Jarrang, they see a £170 return. We're biased but if it's bang for your buck you're looking for, then you need an email marketing programme that delivers results.

2018 is also going to be the year of GDPR. As an email marketing company, it's something we take very seriously and is extremely relevant to us and all our customers. The big impact we'll see is in data collection techniques, use of data and data storage. At present, the key point here is to gather all of your data, find out what you have got, map it and then do an audit on where it came from when the interpretations are published. Once this is done, make a plan to update your privacy policies, re-opt-in your subscribers and ditch the no-no data. You can find out more about what we know so far on GDPR here.

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‍If you need help doing this, or would like further advice on how to create an amazing email marketing programme, then please do let us know.