How Email Marketing Services Can Save Time And Increase Impact

First, I will start with an apology. This wouldn’t be an article about email marketing services if there were no debate about whether or not email is dead.

So I’ll keep this short for everyone’s sake – it’s not. In any way.

Here’s the proof – “According to the Direct Marketing Association Statistical Fact Book, email marketing has a HUGE return on investment (a whopping 4300%) and is considered the most effective of digital marketing tactics,” the balance reported recently.

Now that it’s clear that email marketing is worth the investment, we can move on to some of the other ways that it can help your business.

Where Does the Day Go?

According to a survey done by Adobe, the average office worker spends more than 5 hours a day checking their emails. Many of them are so hooked into email that they even check their work email from the comfort of their home. These numbers are even higher among millennials with the majority of them peeking at their inboxes from bed and in the bathroom.

Suffice to say, people are spending a lot of time sending and receiving emails. However, this does not mean that they are being more productive. A survey conducted by CareerBuilder found that 75% of employers say that at least 2 hours of productivity are lost every day due to distractions of all types.

Let’s break this down – if 6 hours a day are lost to emailing and 2 hours are out the window to distraction, then that’s the whole 8-hour workday. If this is true, then what is really happening during the workday?

How To Cut Down Wasted Email Hours

We’ve already established that people spend a lot of time emailing, but how much of this time is wasted doing unnecessary email tasks? How many hours are spent sending thank-you responses, sending out emails to new prospects, or even just organizing the never-ending onslaught of sent and received mail?

The reality is that there are so many manual email tasks that waste hours of people’s workdays. What makes this even more frustrating is that a lot of these tasks could be easily automated with the right tools.

Choose the Right Tool

In order to choose the right tool, you need to clearly identify your objectives with your email marketing and focus in on where you are losing time. There are literally hundreds of email marketing service tools, so clarifying these elements is essential to squeezing every second out of your time.

For example, someone who loses a lot of time managing and segmenting subscriber lists might seek an email marketing service like AWeber. This service can help save time on engagement with pre-loaded tools that target subscribers and segment strategically based on response.

The Direct Marketing Association Client Email Survey found a 760% increase in revenue from segmented emails. This means that using the right tool for contact management will save you time and create a bigger impact on your audience.

Use Your Tools The Right Way

Just because you sign up for an email marketing service, doesn’t mean that you will be inherently more efficient. In order to see any results, you need to learn how to use your tools properly and leverage their capacity against the bottlenecks and weaknesses in your workflow.

It’s true that email marketing has phenomenal returns on investment, but that doesn’t mean that everyone will be an Internet millionaire overnight. In fact, many people fail miserably at email marketing for a variety of reasons. This may be because those people are using the wrong tools. It may also be because they are not using their tools in the right way.

Let’s consider templates for a second – nearly every email marketing service has some sort of template feature. Whether these templates come pre-loaded or need to be manually crafted, there is a tendency for people to become totally reliant on them.

Sure, you may be able to send out way more emails in an hour, but are you really making any impact? Just because it saves you time, does not mean it is more efficient.

A template is just that – a template. It needs to be filled out and personalized in order to be targeted to the reader. The Experian Email Market Study showed that personalized promotional emails had a 21% higher open rate and 41% higher click rate.

What’s the point in sending more emails if no one is going to read them? Yes, it may save you time, but the key to success is a balance between time-saving techniques and leveraging tools to maximize your impact.

With this balance, an email marketing service can expand your business rapidly and affordably.