How agencies benefit from an email marketing strategy
In my opinion Campaign Monitor truly canes the competition out there. It’s cheaper, easier, and for agencies it’s a dream come true.
-Ben Pujji, Pujji like Gucci
Ben’s experience with Campaign Monitor’s email marketing software is a promising one, and if you haven’t created an email marketing strategy for your agency, there’s never been a better time.
As the top digital marketing channel for ROI, email marketing is here to stay. Plus, your customers prefer email for communicating with brands: Studies have shown that 72.2% of U.S. consumers prefer to receive email communications from businesses over direct mail.
In fact, we recently researched trends in global email marketing and benchmarks. We found:
- The average open rate across all industries fell around 17.8%
- Click-through rates averaged 2.6%
- Click-to-open rates averaged just over 14%
- The average unsubscribe rate decreased to 0.1%
- The average bounce rate also decreased to 0.7%
Source: Campaign Monitor
So, how can agencies live up to the benchmarks? By developing an email marketing strategy that focuses on their audiences, rather than numbers alone.
Agencies must cater to a broader audience base than most businesses. And the key to success relies on relevant, targeted email campaigns, made through segmentation, testing, and dynamic content.
Take the leading digital marketing agency, Bluetent, for example. Their focus is the hospitality and vacation rental space. They cater to a massive audience base because they work with hundreds of property management companies and thousands of vacation rentals. To create and send the most relevant content to their audience, they leverage a full suite of digital marketing tactics to help them create beautiful email marketing campaigns that allow their audience to picture themselves where they want to be.
As you can see in the image below, Bluetent uses customer data to provide trip ideas that are based on recent searches. This is a perfect example of personalizing content, even when an audience is extremely diverse.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Those tactics, when paired with the right email marketing strategy, can help your brand experience the same massive success that Bluetent has seen.
“Ultimately, we went with Campaign Monitor because we felt that the platform was extremely innovative and perfectly aligned with our goals. The app offers an entire portfolio of templates, but we also have the freedom to code and implement our own. Campaign Monitor also allows us to use our own software to fully integrate reservation data with email lists.”
Ryan Austin, Director of Email Marketing, Bluetent
Email marketing is one of the only digital channels that allows you to hyper-target your content to a massive audience. The right email marketing automation software accomplishes this by enabling you to get to know each of your subscribers on a 1×1 level through:
- Email opt-ins – this assures you that they want to be in your lists.
- Email preference centers – allows your subscribers to tell you exactly what they want to receive and how often.
- Email list segmentation – gives you the ability to separate your lists according to your subscriber’s preferences and other relevant data (age, location, gender, etc.) to send only the most relevant information to each person.
Once you’ve collected that essential data, you can take things to the next level through email personalization and email customization.
According to Evergage’s personalization survey, customization is vital to your email marketing strategy because it can:
- Increase visitor engagement by 55%
- Improve the customer experience by 55%
- Increase brand perception by approximately 39%
- Increase overall conversion rate by approximately 51%
- Help to increase both lead generation and customer acquisition by nearly 46%
This shows your audience that you’re paying close attention to them and that they aren’t simply another number in your system. Once you’ve gathered that information, you can send highly targeted emails.
Wrap up
Having an email marketing strategy is vital for agencies. When done right, it can help you in several areas, including customer retention and lead generation through methods such as:
- Email opt-ins
- Sending highly targeted messages
- Getting to know your subscribers by using email preference centers and email segmentation
Curious about how else email marketing could benefit your agency? Then make sure to check out all our available agency resources.