The Power Of Email + Ads ⚡💪
First things first, email marketing, like paid ads, doesn’t make sense for all businesses all of the time.
Businesses that are super new with a low repeat purchase rate may not be able to profitably leverage email marketing, for example.
On the other hand, businesses with a high repurchase rate that also have large untapped email lists could be sitting on top of a gold mine 🤑
For the right business scenarios, email marketing and paid media are a super powerful combo for driving customer acquisition, re-engagement, and ultimately increasing revenue for businesses.
When combined, email and ads are a dynamic duo with great synergy like Wallace and Gromit or Pinky and The Brain 🐭🧠
The ability of email to easily reach out to people who have already had some kind of interaction with the business provides a huge advantage, especially since email doesn’t have the same (almost crippling) privacy limitations as retargeting with paid media.
Using both email marketing and paid media in tandem maximizes the value of each channel’s individual strengths – email campaigns provide an opportunity for personalized communication between brand and customer while paid media ensures reaching a wider audience more quickly rather than trying to expand through organic growth alone.
The integration of these two approaches benefits businesses massively by allowing them to acquire new customers while also retaining existing ones, and also increasing their LTV!
When you combine email with ads, the result is more than the sum of its parts, which can supercharge brands! ⚡⚡⚡
Big Companies Use Email To Crush Small Companies 😵
Wanna know something spooky? 👻
Big companies use email marketing to leverage big data to create LTV projections that allow them to acquire customers at a CPA that can be multiple times higher than smaller companies.
Even if they lose money on a customer acquisition for a year or more, they can be sure of that customer becoming profitable for them at X point in the future.
This often crushes small businesses because:
1
They don’t have a mature email marketing program to drive up LTVs
2
They don’t have years of data to create reliable LTV projections
And guess what’s even spookier? 👻👻👻
The rabbit hole goes deeper 😳🐇
The big guys not only can create accurate projections of the average customer that they acquire, they can also do the same on a much more granular level.
X gender X age customer purchases X product in X geo = an estimated 87.56% LTV vs the overall average.
Hopefully that didn’t induce an existential crisis as the implication is that we’re all much more predictable than we’d like to believe.
On a less philosophical note, the big guys can also tweak their projections based on shifting macroeconomic factors.
So how can smaller companies win? 🤔
Well, unless you have a time machine, the best thing to do is to start email marketing now to drive up your own LTVs and start gathering data so that one day you can do the same thing as the big guys.
Smaller companies have other advantages but starting email as early as practical negates this advantage of the big guys as fast as possible.
Contextual Marketing Is King 👑
By now we know the power of email marketing. So it’s as simple as sending out email blasts to everyone on your list all at once, right?
Wrong! 😃
It’s all about context. The future of marketing in general is contextual marketing, and email isn’t an outlier.
This means that it’s all about serving the right message to the right person at the right time.
Say you have a store with different product categories, like pet supplies. If someone always purchases dog products and never cat products, it wouldn’t make sense to send them an offer on your brand new kitty litter-scooping (possibly sentient?) robot.
Another example that’s less of a foreboding prelude to The Terminator would be if you have a store that sells machinery and replacement parts, it wouldn’t make sense to send someone offers for replacement parts for X machine when they purchased the Y machine.
There’s also the temporality consideration. If your product typically lasts X amount of time, it’d be effective and helpful for your customer for you to schedule a follow up email X days usage time – X days shipping time in the future.
AI Is Taking Over 🤖
It’s no secret that AI is getting out of control. We’re just not sure if it’ll be the kitty litter-scooping bot or some email copy-generating AI that takes over the world.
AI does a great job at generating copy that resonates with the intended recipients. Not convinced? You can try it out for free with Chat GPT. You’ll find that at the very least, it’s also useful for generating ideas which saves a lot of time with creative brainstorming.
With that said, AI isn’t quite to the point of being able to generate effective marketing images from scratch, which are a huge part of email marketing. Plain text emails are another story and ripe for the machines to take over.
It’s one thing to split test AI generated email copy against what us squishy humans can write, but there’s another consideration 🧐
Combining AI with contextual marketing has massive potential to save time on generating email copy for a vast array of situations that those on your email list could find themselves.
So whether they’re 7 days out before their new supplement (that helps cope with the machines taking over) runs out, or someone has an interest in psychedelic mushroom style wall tapestries, AI will be ready to generate and blast out the perfectly-crafted email to that person, right when they need to see it the most.
The Future (SMS)
If we zoom out, email marketing is just about delivering messages to people ✉️
There are other ways that people send and receive messages, such as texting (SMS) and even platforms like LinkedIn, WhatsApp. Facebook Messenger, etc.
Sticking to SMS as it isn’t one centralized platform, it’s a logical next step for email marketing to increasingly expand into SMS.
Why does SMS make so much sense?
Well, the hard work has been done in terms of getting contact information, crafting the messages, planning on when those messages need to go out, etc. The economics of sending out SMS messages (even if edited for that format) while already doing email makes a lot of sense.
Klayvio, often referred to as the gold standard for email marketing, recently launched the ability to launch SMS along with email to their service line.
Be prepared for more and more AI generated messages to slide into your DMs 👀
Conclusion
As marketing becomes increasingly efficient, it’s vital for businesses with good use cases for email to utilize it to the max! 📈
The big guys have a distinct advantage with their mature email marketing programs and big data but smaller companies can quickly negate this advantage, especially since the barrier to entry is lower than ever 😼
Smaller companies can use AI and contextual marketing to leverage email marketing more efficiently and in a more customer-centric way 🤖
The future of email marketing is essentially “message” marketing as it will expand to more messaging platforms 📨
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