Why Software Companies Should Use Email Marketing

There are a number of marketing channels available to software companies today, from social media to email marketing to websites. Each has its benefits, but 80% of marketing professionals agree that email marketing drives customer acquisition and retention. Read on to learn about the benefits and uses of email marketing for your company.

What Can Email Marketing Accomplish?

Email marketing can help your software company achieve success in a number of different areas, from informing customers about product launches to generating leads. Email marketing has a number of benefits and uses for software companies. It’s a low-cost way to reach your audience, and allows you to target your messaging to different audience segments.

Benefits of Using Email Marketing

Builds Credibility
By sharing informative content that helps your audience, you build credibility and establish your company as a thought leader in your industry.

Customer Acquisition
Email marketing is one of the most effective digital mediums for acquiring new customers. While social media has a needed place in your marketing mix, when it comes to acquiring new customers, email is almost 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined. A 2016 survey of marketing professionals even found that 81% of respondents said email marketing drives customer acquisition.

Cost-Effective
Using email marketing, companies can reach a large number of consumers or prospects in a cost-effective manner. Research from the Direct Marketing Association showed that for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $40 in return on investment (ROI).

Customizable and Personal
With marketing automation programs, you can easily segment your audience into lists, giving you the opportunity to customize your content to each list. For example, you can send a different email to recipients that are in different stages of your sales funnel, tailored to the stage they’re currently in. Marketing automation also allows you to address your customers by name in the subject line or body copy of your email, making your emails more personal. Personalized email marketing campaigns increase click-through rates by an average of 14 percent and improve conversion rates by 10 percent.

Action-Oriented and Measurable
Marketing emails naturally lend themselves to giving users opportunities to take action, whether that’s replying, forwarding the email, or clicking through to a website from a link in the email. With today’s marketing automation programs, you can also easily measure these actions to see, for example, how many recipients have opened your email, or how many users are visiting your website by clicking a link in an email.

Uses for Email Marketing

Product Launches
Email marketing is a great way to introduce new products to your current and potential customer base. It’s a great way to get information out to a large number of interested people at once.

Generate Leads and Drive Website Traffic
Email is often used as a marketing tactic to generate leads and drive website traffic. By including links to your website or to an online contact form in your emails, you can increase the number of visitors to your website.

Customer Feedback
Emailing surveys to your client base allows you to collect customer feedback that you can use to improve your business and your clients’ satisfaction.

Keep Customers Informed in a Timely Manner
A popular use of email marketing is a weekly or monthly email newsletter. This is a quick and easy way to keep your customers up to date on your latest product updates or company news.

Add Value to Customer Relationships
One marketing study found that 91% of United States adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with. To add value to your customer relationships, you can send welcome emails with useful tips to new customers, or send coupons or other deals to current customers.

Email Marketing Tips for Software Companies

Software companies must be strategic in their use of email marketing to reap its many benefits. Emails must be carefully composed, and consideration must be given to the time of day the emails will be sent out, how often they’ll be sent out, which list of email subscribers will receive the email, and what action the company wants the recipients to take upon receiving the email. Here are some email marketing tips to use when planning your email strategy.

• Don’t send marketing emails to recipients who haven’t requested them. With the large amount of emails that users receive every day, unwanted emails are likely to be marked as spam and deleted.
• Continually update your opt-in lists in order to increase engagement with your marketing emails. Use your marketing automation program to keep your mailing lists current. For example, remove email addresses from your email list when they haven’t opened several of your emails in a row.
• Keep your email content interesting and brief. Pay attention to your subject lines, making sure they are professional in tone, and keep the content in the body of your email short and to the point.
• Use analytics to adjust strategy as needed. Take a look at your open rates (the percentage of users who open your emails), as well as the click-through rates, in order to see what’s working and what isn’t, and adjust your strategy accordingly.

Conclusion

Software companies should use email marketing not only because it is a great tool to improve your marketing strategy, but also because it drives customer acquisition and retention. Email marketing allows for personal, targeted messaging to different audience segments, and drives lead generation. It can help accomplish business goals, and it offers a low-cost, versatile way to strengthen relationships with current and potential clients. Find more business tips here.

Originally published at https://www.globalpaymentsintegrated.com.