EMAIL MARKETING IN POST-COVID-19 TIMES

3 min read

Email marketing

With the coronavirus hitting hard on the economy worldwide, not only retailers had to implement changes in the way they run their business, but also the behaviour of their customers has changed dramatically. In rather ambiguous directions.

As a growing number of consumers refrain from going out and doing in-store shopping and more and more shops shutting down due to the pandemic, many retailers gear their marketing efforts towards online platforms even more than they did before.

As a vivid example, many food stores have implemented online ordering as well as curbside delivery - a service, that became especially popular in these challenging pandemic times, as larger crowds of people prefer to shop online. Getting the message out to those customers was a no brainer. Big retailers like Walmart Inc reached out to its customers via email with a message that read “We’ve enhanced Drive Up with your safety in mind. No signature required and we’ll load your trunk, too.”

It is not a secret, that online marketing is probably the most utilized tool when trying to get the message across to the consumer. But during the post-pandemic times business owners may consider pushing for it even harder.

Email marketing campaigns in the post-pandemic times

Here’s some statistics to digest: according to Statista 2020, in 2019, global email users constituted the number of 3.9 billion. This figure is set to grow to 4.3 billion users in 2023. This is almost half of the world population! And with the world in lockdown that number could grow even more. This statistics undoubtedly proves that email marketing is an opportunity not to be underrated.

Further to that and employing more COVID-related researches, the number of email opens significantly increased in March and April of 2020. According to Campaign Monitor, the 16% increase change in opens from February to March indicates audience interest in what businesses have to say. As more and more people stayed at home, the ultimate way of communicating with the outside world (aside from social media and phone/zoom calls) was emailing. Despite the fact that we have started to slowly roll out of the quarantine regime, the “back to normal” transition will obviously not happen over a week or even a month. So making email your primary mean of communication with your customers should stay the main focus in your business strategy. If this is not persuasive enough, consider the rumours about the second wave of the virus potentially coming up and hitting us even harder.

Speaking about monetary reward, according to DMA Benchmarking Report 2019, you can be making $52.25 return on every $1.25 spent on email marketing. Another research-supported proof that a well-thought and a properly employed email marketing strategy can make you a dollar in your pocket.

What about what’s in your email? It is probably not the best idea to reach out to your potential customers with a chopped email offering your services or products from the word go, especially if you are a newly baked start up, and especially in the times when your customers are being more serious-minded. Your email might end up hanging out in the inbox unopened, or, in the worst-case scenario, your potential customer will unsubscribe. According to GetResponse 2017, a Welcome email has an average open rate of 82%, and click-through rate of around 27%. These figures prove that making an appeal to a potential customer with a Welcome email, rather than with a direct promo offer, not only provides better deliverability, but will also positively affect your conversion rates.

This is why it is so important to focus on where you send your emails and how many of them get to the recipients inbox and subsequently get opened. For all of the above our team has created Mailcheck - an email validation tool that will help you grasp it all in one step. Mailcheck uses sophisticated algorithms to validate authenticity of the email addresses in your database. Aside from automatic search and validation, we also provide manual moderation. So we use all the power of social networks and search engines, for more in-depth validation. For the past three years we have been improving our validation system, and today it takes us only 15 minutes to validate 1 000 000 email addresses. API integration feature is one other property that makes Mailcheck different from the competitors. API integration allows validating your email database on the go saving one extra step in your email marketing routine. With API integration your email marketing routine will remain intact, but your email list will be validated each time you launch your newsletter campaign.

Difficult times come, and the COVID-19 is certainly one of those. But there were no times in history when businesses failed to adapt to the rapidly changing economy. It’s all about employing some analysis, re-thinking your business practices and taking advantage of the little tools that are so easily available to us to quickly and effectively adapt to these non-easy times.

Read more in other useful articles on our blog.

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