Email marketing and online advertising are two of the most popular ways of growing your business on the internet. These practices go hand in hand. In fact, most professional digital marketers will suggest that you should leverage the benefits of these practices equally to get the maximum potential for growth on the internet. All small and large organizations in the world are spending heavily on their internet marketing today. On an average, a person is fed nearly 1,700 banner ads on the internet every month. (Source)
Advantages of Email Marketing
Here are a few advantages of email marketing on the internet.
Personalized Approach
The email marketing helps you use mail merge fields to personalize the whole marketing campaign. Online marketing automation and email marketing tools like HubSpot and Pardot can help you personalize the whole approach to fit the prospects’ needs. With these tools, you can send emails to people that pique their interest in the right manner.
For example, a person shows a keen interest in purchasing shoes on the internet. Now, common sense suggests that instead of sending emails on the latest electronic gadgets, you should send the person emails on the latest shoes. This way, you can easily the prospect into a customer.
Guaranteed Delivery
We are bombarded with advertisements and promotions on the internet daily. However, after years of browsing the internet, we have developed a knack for ignoring these ads completely. Stats show that over half of the 1,700 ads that we see on an average go completely unnoticed. (Source) This is not the case with email marketing. Your email might still go unopened or end up in the spam folder of the prospect’s email address. However, you can rest assured that it was delivered in the first place. This increases the chances of an effective delivery by a significant amount.
Higher Click to Conversion Rates
Email marketing has the potential to bring more sales-ready leads to your business. Experts agree that the click to conversion rates with email marketing are far more superior compared to an online advertisement. The higher conversion rates directly translate to more customers in a shorter period of time.
Good Return on Investment
The higher click to conversion rate often translates to a better return on investment. You can spend a series of back to back emails to millions of prospects for a few hundred dollars. On the other hand, you need a considerable amount of seed money to start the online marketing venture.
Easily Measurable
Measuring the success/failure of your email marketing campaign is extremely simple and straightforward. A pretty simple CRM tool can help you keep track of your progress with the email marketing campaigns.
Advantages of Online Advertising
Here are a few advantages of online advertising.
Reach a Wider Audience Base
Email marketing allows you to reach only a very limited scope of audience. You need to have the right email address of the people you wish to reach to run the email campaigns. On the other hand, you don’t need any such information while running online advertisements. However, if you do have the email IDs and the purchase-intent data for the audience that you wish to reach, you can always leverage that into your online advertising efforts.
Effective Use of Digital Media Tools
With email marketing, you have limited the scope of using digital media advertisements. You can either send text-based messages or infographics and images in the form of an advertisement. With online advertising, you can use video-based advertisement channels too. Studies show that people would rather watch a short 5-minute video clip rather than going through a long article or blog to get the necessary information. For example, Twitter stats recently showed that the rate of video consumption is growing at a staggering rate of 220% in the last year. (Source)
Great for Spreading Brand Awareness
Online advertising is not meant for focused advertisement and campaigns. Instead, it is meant for spreading general awareness about your product/service. With the right means, you can leverage social media to build your brand on the internet quickly.
Time Effective Marketing
You can start your online advertising campaigns very quickly. You don’t need to purchase a tonne of email IDs and check the validity of these emails to start using for marketing. In fact, you can reach millions of people with the click of a single button. On the other hand, planning your online advertising campaigns by investing more time and resources into it helps a lot for better conversion rates
Better Diversification
You can easily diversify your marketing efforts into multiple domains with online advertising. Unlike email marketing, you can use multiple modes of social media and blogging channels to run your online advertising campaigns. In fact, most digital marketers understand the importance of leveraging SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), and SMM (Social Media Marketing) together.
Using Email Marketing and Online Advertising Together
As it is evident from the advantages of email marketing and online advertising, both fit into each other like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. A digital marketer who can leverage both these practices simultaneously can grow his/her brand very quickly. Here are a few tips that a digital marketer can implement while using both these marketing channels simultaneously.
The Process of Using the Power Duo Together
There are thousands of different ways in which one can use the combination of these two marketing channels simultaneously. Here is one of the most popular ways that people use on a regular basis to streamline their marketing efforts. You can follow this process in the given order to reap the benefits of a great digital marketing strategy.
Strategic Placement of Landing Pages
Landing pages are a form of online advertising that help you do to main things. Firstly, they help you push the necessary information out onto the internet. Secondly, they help you collect pertinent information for the email marketing process. Highly optimized landing pages can help you make the best of both worlds very easily.
Although landing pages are extremely important, most people do not know how to leverage them in the most effective manner. In fact, landing pages are the leakiest component of the online advertisement and sales cycles. Collecting the right information of prospects is truly a hassle with landing pages. The best way to make sure that your prospects put in the right information on the landing pages is to offer them something truly valuable in return.
Remarketing
Landing pages help you run remarketing campaigns with a great amount of ease. You can easily invest a lot of time and money into remarketing and still come out empty-handed. Effective remarketing happens only when you can understand the prospects’ needs in a wholesome fashion. You need to leverage the purchase-intent data, that is, the prospects’ needs in the right manner to run remarketing campaigns.
Remarketing can happen via both online advertisements as well as email marketing simultaneously.
Collection of Data
You can collect the email address and other contact details of your prospects using the landing pages. However, you cannot run your marketing and advertising campaigns blindly on this raw data. In fact, you need to invest a considerable amount of time segregating this data into a structured format for effective campaigning.
After segregation, you can easily run campaigns with higher conversion ratios via both email marketing and online advertising. The top digital marketers use tools like CRM to segregate the data in an effective manner and keep a track of the campaigns that they run. Advanced CRM tools also help the marketer track the customer engagement in an effective manner.
Targeted Email Campaigning
Once you have collected the purchase-intent data along with the necessary contact information, you can start running targeted email campaigns very effectively. You can easily see higher click-to-conversion ratios as you increase the amount of effort you put in personalizing each campaign.
At this point, the digital marketer needs to evaluate the amount of time he/she is putting in personalizing the campaign effectively. Getting a 100% click to conversion ratio is not desirable if you are creating one campaign for 10 people in a day. In fact, getting a 10% conversion rate for a campaign that you create for 1000 people is much more effective. In the latter effort, you easily get 10 times more sales-ready leads to your business.
Cross-sell, Up-sell and Resell Opportunities
Selling your prospect once is just the beginning of the sales cycle. In fact, to make sure that you get the best return on investment you need to invest your resources in multiple cross-sell, up-sell and re-sell opportunities. If you have a large e-commerce store with thousands of related products, you can easily leverage these opportunities for excellent ROI.
Make sure that your marketing campaigns are backed up by a reliable and solid sales plan to reap the benefits in the long term. Combining great sales and marketing techniques is the best way to create a sustainable business model.