Email can provide you with one of the most effective tools in your marketing toolbox. If you craft your messages well, you could join the ranks of other savvy companies that profit from recipients who look forward to seeing newsletters and promotional offers in their inboxes. While email often occupies a critical position in an overall marketing plan, a more effective marketing strategy also includes other tactics that help generate, nurture, and convert leads. You can make sure that more people see your marketing messages by capitalizing on multiple marketing channels.
Why Email Marketing Can’t Work Alone
These are two solid reasons why you should not just rely upon email marketing:
Email Competes With Plenty of Distractions
The Radicati Group, a technology research firm, conducted an extensive survey of the kinds of electronic communication that companies employ. They concluded that email still maintains the top position as the most common communication method for business. At the same time, email’s very pervasiveness may dilute its effectiveness.
Average email users receive at least 120 messages in their inbox every day. No matter how well you craft your email subject and content, you can’t expect everybody to open every message that you send.
You’re Missing Out on a Wider Audience
Even if you’ve grown a very strong list of email subscribers, you know you haven’t managed to reach every potential customer. Email is still growing; however, the Radicati Group’s study found that growth has slowed in the past few years.
Your potential customers also turn to search engines, social sites, industry-specific or local blogs and forums, or even video sites when they want to research the services or products that you offer. If you don’t connect with your audience where they search for information, you can expect a competitor with a broader marketing plan to beat you to them. You need to position your brand, so it can be found when your ideal customers research purchases online.
Implementing a Multi-Channel Marketing Strategy for Growth
You can drive growth by complementing email marketing with a multi-channel marketing strategy. Different aspects of your multi-channel marketing strategy should all work together to support overall business growth and make each channel stronger.
Consider how these marketing channels could help you attract more customers:
Mobile Marketing
Most marketers agree that it’s well past time to reach buyers on their preferred internet devices. Businesses may have been a bit slower to adapt mobile than consumers, but they’re quickly catching up. Overall, searchers prefer mobile devices to laptops and desktops for product and service research in the United States and several other countries. Google found that about half of all B2B researchers use their mobile devices to conduct research while they’re at work.
Researchers have also found that online messages have open rates that are about three times higher than email messages, and comparative CTRs may be twice as high as that. You may have noticed that some progressive companies have turned to social site messaging apps because social users tend to react quickly to these messages.
Businesses haven’t stopped using email; however, messaging and other more mobile-friendly online communication methods have begun to grow at a faster pace. In some cases, they can also give your company quicker results.
Social Networking Sites
According to Pew Research, almost 80 percent of all Americans who use the internet have a Facebook account. Out of these, three-quarters report logging into Facebook at least once a day. Some examples of other popular and busy social sites include LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. The best social sites to market on may depend upon your industry and the demographics of typical customers.
These sites have become increasingly popular with Millennials and also with older adults, so it’s likely that your customers spend more time online using social sites than they do studying their email inboxes. Besides benefiting from being able to enjoy two-way communication with your customers and followers with social site messaging, there are plenty of other ways to you can increase brand awareness and capture leads. Some examples include adding content to your active business pages and paying for social ads.
Paid Search Advertising
You can bet that when your potential customers are ready to research purchases, they gravitate towards search engines. HubSpot summarized Google’s own findings that two out of three B2B researchers begin their research with traditional search engines and also tend to perform multiple searches before they engage with a company. With paid search advertising, you can make certain that your company’s marketing message sits at the top of search pages.
In addition, paid search traffic can offer fast and consistent results in a way that few other marketing tactics can match. You can use that quick traffic to test your sales pages to make sure you have optimized lead gathering and conversions. In that way, paid searches can also help support your other marketing channels. With the right metrics and testing in place, you can reduce the cost of paid traffic over time as you see what works most effectively for your business.
Organic Search Traffic
Organic search traffic refers to the regular, non-paid results that searchers see after they enter keywords. The major search engines work hard to design algorithms that display results in the order by authority and relevancy. Optimizing a business website to rank well means it has to display relevant content on the pages and have other quality sites mention or link back to the site to give it authority. Optimizing a website to rank well often requires time and an investment. At the same time, you don’t have to pay for each click.
Natural results are usually placed below the paid ads; however, experienced search engine users understand the difference between paid and natural search listings. Research suggests that many searchers find organic results more credible because they perceive them as earned and not paid for. It takes more time to earn natural search results than to buy paid search placements, but you can enjoy long-term profits.
Display Ads
You can find industry-relevant blogs, forums, and publications for any business. For instance, accounting software developers may advertise on sites that attract small business owners or accountants that work with small businesses. You can do well with display ads if you directly target users of these websites to provide them with engaging offers.
Because visitors to these sites did not specifically come to see your offer, you need to design creatives that can entice your audience to click your ad. For example, you might offer free information or a trial offer in exchange for filling out your lead form. You can certainly use display ads to sell directly, but you may find that they are a most effective way to gather leads and build brand awareness.
Retargeting
Retargeting technology allows you to tag previous customers or site visitors. In fact, mobile retargeting technology might even allow you to tag people who are either near or have visited your physical location. This gives you a unique chance to present these people with a marketing message that’s designed to meet them exactly where they are in the process of researching buying decisions.
Certainly, retargeting provides you with a great way to reinforce your message with customers that you’ve made some contact with in the past. If they visited your business site and didn’t buy, maybe it’s time to offer them a promotional deal or shipping discount. It also allows you to offer promotions or reminders to your current customers. If customers purchased a dozen of your printers for an office, you might remind them that you also deliver toner and printer ink.
Multi-Channel Marketing Will Help You Grow Your Business
Your solid email list can offer you an effective way to generate and convert leads. You might still consider it the backbone of your sales funnel. At the same time, you will probably find that you can grow your list and your profits by cashing in on the growth and effectiveness of other marketing channels. You don’t need to invest in everything all at once. In fact, a carefully planned and measured marketing strategy can enable you to grow at a brisk pace while controlling risks.
