9 reasons you want to start email marketing now

Reason 1: Email marketing vs. other channels

Have you ever contrasted email marketing with other channels? Social media, for example. You reach your target audience with social media, right? Sure! Via channels such as X, Meta or LinkedIn, you also reach your target group. Yet it is much more difficult than e-mail marketing. With a social media post, you shoot a message into the world, so to speak. Then you have to wait and see what happens and who it reaches. In addition, a social media post passes its reach after a day: the post then (almost) does not appear in the timeline anymore. In turn, an e-mail stays in your recipient's inbox, waiting to be opened. Sometimes you see customers opening your e-mail after a day, two days or even a week.

Also consider other channels such as Google Advertising. For Google, you pay to show ads to your audience. Although you can target your ads tremendously well, again the question is whether the ad reaches the right audience.

With e-mail marketing, your customers consciously sign up for the newsletter. You have a target audience interested in your message anyway. Therefore, email marketing will ultimately be more targeted.

Now, it's not that you shouldn't use other channels precisely. Email has a relatively low cost and high turnover. Together with other channels, the channels will reinforce each other in conversions.

Reason 2: Email marketing has a high Return On Investment

Have you ever heard of the term ROI, or Return On Investment? ROI indicates whether the investment has a positive or negative return. Email marketing has a very high ROI.

With Reloadify, for instance, you pay a fixed monthly fee, based on your active profiles, and you can send unlimited emails. Email marketing costs you little time and generates a lot of sales. That is why it is a smart move to use e-mail marketing.

ROI helps you understand whether your campaigns are profitable. Research shows that e-mail marketing achieves an average ROI of 36. This means that for every euro you spend, it earns you 36 euros. Of course, this varies by industry. But it's a nice statistic to keep in the back of your mind.

Reason 3: Email marketing is cheap

Email marketing is and can be deployed cheaply. Because you deploy your email marketing smartly, you are left with a marketing budget for other things. Not only do you have costs of your email software, but also of campaign management. It is smart to include these costs as well. Once these campaigns are in place and sent out, they will start making money. In addition, there are a lot of email campaigns that can be automated. Consider an abandoned cart flow. Does a customer have an abandoned cart? Then send an automated email. Does the order remain outstanding? Then send a reminder after a day. Or send an automatic e-mail as soon as your customer has signed up for the newsletter. These are some examples of automation you set up where conversions come afterward. It requires some time and energy from you in the beginning, but after that, you will see that it definitely pays off. As a result, email marketing is relatively very cheap to use.

Reason 4: Email marketing is easy to measure

Emails give you a whole insight into exactly what your target audience wants to see and what they don't want to see. Not for nothing do you want to get the right message to your customers at the right time. So what metrics are best to pay attention to?

Open rate

The open rate is the number of recipients who opened an e-mail, compared to all recipients of the e-mail. The open rate is always expressed as a percentage. It is the percentage of customers out of the total number of recipients who actually open the e-mail. Since Apple's 2021 iOS update, the open rate has become less reliable. Nevertheless, it is still an important KPI to look at.

Click rate

Your click rate is the percentage of your customers who actually clicked in your email. Your click rate is expressed in percentages. This says something about the effectiveness of your email. Is your email interesting enough to click through? You want your e-mail to draw your customers to your website in order to eventually convert.

Click-to-opens

Clicks-to-opens are the number of clicks versus number of opens. This figure is also expressed as a percentage. From this figure, you learn how many people found your e-mail interesting enough to actually click in. This is different from your click rate.

Number of unsubscribes

The number of unsubscribes from your newsletter is important to keep an eye on. It shows how interested your customers are in your newsletter. Does your content connect with your target audience? Is it what your customers expect from you? The fewer unsubscribes you eventually get from your newsletter, the better. Then you can be sure you are relevant.

Number of spam reports

This is the percentage of customers that specifically say your e-mail is spam. This, logically, is something you want to avoid. If you keep sending emails where you are marked as spam, this is bad for your deliverability. Besides, it also says something about the content of your e-mail or frequency of your e-mail: your customers don't find you engaging and report you as spam. Therefore, always take action if you are reported as spam.

Number of conversions

Of course, what is not at all unimportant is the number of conversions per e-mail sent. Look closely at what the newsletter has converted to. Is it a product that was highlighted well or another product? Learn from this and optimize your newsletter.

Reason 5: Reach all your target audiences easily

With e-mail marketing, you reach a large target group by sending your newsletter. You stay top of mind with smaller target groups by sending targeted newsletters. Think, for example, of customers who are fans of a specific brand or product. You can make it as crazy as you want, you always reach your target groups through e-mail marketing. By sending targeted e-mails, you address the right target group.

So be never mistaken about the reach of your target groups. Nor in what reach you have. You check your mailbox every day, don't you? The e-mail is often checked several times a day. If the e-mail you receive is very relevant to you, the sender immediately comes across as trustworthy. After all, the sender knows you very well. That person knows what you are interested in.

Target groups are called segments in Reloadify. You create a dynamic segment in Reloadify based on criteria you set up. Think last purchase was X days ago or customer bought brand X. Every minute, hour and day this segment is different, depending on the filter rules you set. Every minute, the system checks which customers match your segment. Based on a segment, you can create a targeted newsletter or set up a targeted flow. With a flow, you make sure that when customers do not take action, a reminder e-mail goes their way. Think, for example, of an abandoned shopping cart. Send your customer an email when he abandons the cart. Let him return to your website. Does the order then still remain outstanding? Send a reminder. This time with a discount code to win the customer over.

Reason 6: Customers like to be mailed personalised offers

Everyone gets mail through their postbox. Be it advertising leaflets or the newspaper. You don't ask for it, you get it. Everyone gets the same advertising leaflets. Unless you have a clear no-no sticker, of course. In that case, you explicitly indicate that you don't want to receive advertising. The newspaper also says the same thing for everyone. Nothing is personalized. That's where the power of e-mail marketing comes in. It is possible to make e-mail marketing as personalized as possible. After all, you have a lot of data on your customers. Whereas an advertising brochure does not have this of you. Just think of the personalized bonus offers from Albert Heijn in your inbox. You probably tend to read this e-mail rather than the bonus folder in your letterbox. A personalized approach often works best of all. In addition, you can check for yourself that e-mail marketing does not stop with a frequent newsletter. We would like to give you some examples of when you can e-mail your customer at the right time.

Example 1: Transactional emails

These emails are what all your customers who order from you get. Think of an order confirmation, the invoice and finally the track and trace code. These emails are often sent from your platform. They are automatic and always related to a purchase. Sometimes we forget how important these emails are. Because without confirmation of your order, you immediately assume that your order did not arrive at the webshop properly. You then quickly contact customer service. That is something you want to avoid as a webshop. So always set this up properly in the backend of your webshop.

Example 2: The regular newsletter

By far the most well-known reason to reach your customers: the newsletter. Customers sign up to be informed about the very latest offers. Make use of this. Some companies send a newsletter once a month, where others do so once a week. Test carefully what works best for your audience. Do you insist on sending out a newsletter every day or every week? Then think carefully about what message you want to convey to your customers. Do you have good offers ready? Or do you have other news to share? You always want to be relevant.

Example 3: Special offers

Besides regular offers that you include in your newsletter, you also have special offers. By special offers we mean holidays such as Christmas, Easter, Liberation Day, King's Day and you name it. Be as creative as possible and pick days that matter to your business. A handy catch-up calendar can help you with this. This calendar lists holidays per month that you can easily pick up on. Big turnover days such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday are days you don't want to miss. But, smaller parties can also be celebrated, such as your company's birthday. Anything is possible, as long as you attach a nice offer to it, you have another reason to e-mail your customers.

Example 4: Event emails

For personal events, you would like to let your customer know that you are thinking of him. Think of his birthday. How nice is it to receive a digital gift? You can also celebrate the anniversary when a customer has been a customer with you for one, two or even five years. In Reloadify, you easily filter at the time of the first purchase. Celebrate these special occasions with your customer. This includes not only these special occasions, but also a welcome e-mail after subscribing to the newsletter. Actually, grab any event that touches your customer in this category. Similarly, a win-back e-mail for when your customer hasn't ordered from you for a while, or an e-mail with a thank-you note that your customer just ordered from you a lot. Retaining and rewarding current customers is very important. These customers have already ordered from you once and the chance that they will order from you again is many times higher than that a new customer will order from you.

Reason 7: Save time

E-mail marketing lends itself well to automation. You simply set up e-mails, which are triggered, for example, by an action from your customer. The e-mail is sent automatically at the right time. Give yourself time and space to set up e-mail marketing. Think about building flows and triggers. Once this is well-thought-out and set up, you will see it start generating sales. Automate certain results. Set up an A/B test and learn from the results. Look at which shipping day converts best for your business and respond smartly. By continuously learning and optimizing, you will get the best out of your e-mail marketing. Do you have a flow that works well for you? Then it is only a matter of time before you have earned your investment back. Do you see more sales opportunities? Then exploit them right away. Create an extra flow or trigger. Does your webshop have several languages? Then set up this flow for each language. Via Reloadify, you can easily duplicate your flow or trigger from one language to another. That saves a lot of time. Because you have all kinds of personalization options with e-mail marketing, every step of the customer journey can be mapped. Automate your marketing and you will see that you save time.

Reason 8: Mobile usage is becoming increasingly important

Do you see many people looking at their mailboxes? Or rather looking at their phones? It is impossible to imagine our daily lives without the mobile phone. How cool is it to reach your customer on mobile. You can optimize e-mail marketing so that your e-mails are 100% mobile readable. Of course, Reloadify is responsive. This means that the design you create automatically scales on a smaller screen like a tablet or mobile phone. This is very convenient. That way, you never have to worry about whether your e-mail is readable or not. Want to go a step further? Then you can make the whole design of your e-mail different for mobile and desktop. Imagine you want a bit more text in your desktop design and larger images in your mobile design. This is possible by hiding certain elements for desktop or just for mobile. You can also switch the order of rows on your mobile version. So you are always in control.

Reason 9: Email is widely used and fast

Do you have a last-minute action? Or do you need to 'just throw out' that email from your manager? This happens more often than you think. It is precisely because e-mail is so easily accessible that it is widely used by web shops. It allows you to reach a large target group in one fell swoop. Just when you need it. Think of a price error on the website, a closed day for your shop due to illness or a good deal for your customers. All emails that need to get out at the last minute. Fortunately, this is possible. Because sending an e-mail is quick and easy to put together. You reach your target group within minutes. And that is exactly what you want at that moment.

There are plenty of reasons to include email marketing in your marketing mix. In doing so, choose the right email software. One that suits you and is fast. Email is both a marketing and communication tool you use to maintain relationships with your customers. On both a large and small scale. Thereby, personalization is very important to keep your target groups captivated. This channel can easily work for any e-commerce business. Want to know more about what e-mail marketing can do for you? Start your free trial and get started right away.