7 Reasons Why Email Marketing Works for Food and Wine

Has anyone told you that email marketing is old hat, and social media, SEO or mobile marketing is where you’ll cash in?

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

Email marketing is definitely not dead.

In fact, according to a recent McKinsey & Co. survey it is nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined when acquiring customers.

40. Times. More. Effective.

At getting you customers.

Not visitors, prospects, tyre kickers or sticky beaks.

Customers.

Yep, the people who actually buy from you.

Sure, it’s not as glamourous as social media, or as hot a topic as SEO, but if you want bang for your buck, you can’t go past it.

It’s amazingly cost-effective and has one of the highest ROI around.

And it’s still one of the best ways to have an instant, direct line of communication with your prospects and customers. Particularly important today, when the majority of people are connected to their email 24/7.

Think about it…

How many times a day do you check email on your phone or tablet? I bet you’ve looked at it since you started reading this blog!

That’s why you need to be where your customers are – in their inbox.

As we told you back in another Food for Thought blog, email marketing can bring you:

• More customers
• More attention
• More opportunity {to be shared}…which of course leads to
• More SALES!!

But there is a trick.

You need good content.

To get the email opened, read, acted upon and hopefully, shared, you have to provide your prospects with information they value, in return for their valuable time.

Fail to do so and they’ll be very quick to hit delete, or worse, unsubscribe.

Without further ado, here are the 7 reasons why email marketing works and you’ll benefit from including email campaigns in your marketing arsenal.

#1 – Save, time, effort and resources

Want to hear another mind-blowing statistic?

According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing brings in $40 for every $1 you spend.

How’s that for amazing ROI!

There’s no costs for printing, postage or advertising making it super affordable.

You also don’t have the lead-time and effort involved in offline direct marketing – from the time it takes to write, design and approve, not to mention the time associated with printing, stuffing envelopes and mailing out.

With email, your next campaign could be out in 2 hours or less!

This in itself is a huge advantage because it means you can easily deliver real-time content to your subscribers.

It also makes it easy to have more frequent communication with your customers – you could easily stay in touch once a week.

#2 – Get personal with targeted emails

As we all know, not all customers want the same thing.

Email marketing is perfect for targeted, dynamic marketing as it allows you to segment your mailing based on the information you’ve collected about your customers.

Be it demographics like age, gender and location or interests and buyer behaviour.

And the good news is – the majority of email service providers make it super easy to segment your subscriber list and feed in personalised information such as purchase history.

The power of being so specific is sure to result in increased conversions.

Wine is a great example. If you know everyone who bought a particular variety, you can let them know when the first bottles of your next vintage are available.

#3 – Increase brand awareness & stay top of mind

Every time you press send on an email campaign, you build on what consumers know about you, your products and your business.

Staying in touch with your customer means that even if they’re not in the market for your particular wine or produce at that time, when they do want it, your brand will be who they think of first.

#4 – Drive sales

According to figures released by ExactTarget, 50% of online users bought something as a result of an email. That’s higher than any other marketing channel!

And since you ultimately want more sales – this figure speaks volumes.

Email marketing is a great channel for promoting new products or broadcasting details of your latest sale and can give your customers immediate access to what you’re promoting if you sell online.

When done well, these time-sensitive campaigns can drive customers to your online store and retail locations.

#5 – Harness the power of the Forward

The beauty of email marketing is that it’s so incredibly easy to share.

If a customer likes what they read, all they need to do is hit Forward to tell their friends about your deals, special offers or interesting news.

It only takes seconds to do.

Then you instantly have brand advocates acting on your behalf, which in turn creates greater exposure for your brand and increases your credibility.

#6 – Measure your success & learn what customers want

One of the biggest benefits of email marketing is that it can provide precise and valuable metrics that you can actually use.

Not only can you track open rates, click throughs and unsubscribes, but you can also combine it with sales data.

Say for example you include a discount in your email. You can track all the sales where the discount is redeemed and use this to generate a real ROI.

Another powerful aspect of email is gaining real insight into what your customers want.

Based on what’s being clicked on, acted upon and shared, you can make subsequent campaigns more successful and make important decisions about future purchasing or sales.

#7 – Build a loyal customer base

Not only is email marketing great at getting you customers, it helps you keep them.

And that’s not to be underestimated.

It’s an accepted fact that getting a new customer is more than 10 times more expensive than keeping them. Yet so many businesses only focus on converting leads, rather than nurturing their existing customers.

Turning a new customer into a lifetime customer is crucial and is a perfect way to use email marketing.

You can use email to say thank you for buying, to let them know about complimentary items, to send special birthday discounts or to encourage them to buy again.

In short, we love email marketing.

While it gets overlooked by many (or put in the ‘when I get time basket’), email marketing is effective, targeted, low-cost, environmentally friendly, shareable, measureable and simple.

If you run a restaurant, hotel or winery, then we highly recommend including email marketing in your overall marketing mix.

If we haven’t convinced you here that you need to get on board, then sign up for our regular email updates and we’ll give you first-hand experience on how we use it.

Until next time…..