The Best Email Marketing Alternative for Marketing
Marketing evolves with time. The newest means of communication are always on top of the best marketing techniques. If we look at olden times, we had the radio, it shifted to TVCs and then even DVCs. One such technique is email marketing. However, in this fast-paced world, email marketing seems slower. Hence, an email marketing alternative is required.
Text marketing proved to be more efficient when it came to direct response marketing. Texting is not a new concept or even text marketing is not new. However, it is relatively gaining momentum for the past couple of years as one of the best. In this guide, we will talk about email marketing and the best email marketing alternative for marketers in 2021.
Why do we need an alternative?
Of course, the first question to pop into anyone’s mind is that emails work fine! Why do we need an alternative? While email marketing may not be dead, it surely seems to be taking its last breaths. Of course, it is still very much so active and it may take a long time before it eradicates. It works well hand in hand with other forms of marketing. However, it seems to have lost its charm in the past couple of years.
Here are a few reasons why it is imperative to look for a better approach to marketing other than emails.
- Channel preference
Since marketing is mostly mass communication, the channel preference of the masses must be the foundation of marketing. Apart from statistics, it is almost a known fact that everybody has their phones within five feet of their reach. A study showed that 76% of millennials prefer texting over any other form of communication. Moreover, another study showed that 75% of Gen-Z prefer texting. Both these groups make up about 51% of the US population. Hence, it is clear that the channel of communication preference is higher when it comes to texting.
Another survey said 9 out of 10 consumers prefer receiving business messages on their smartphones rather than through another medium. Hence, even the marketing communication method that is preferable is not email. - Spam
Spam is annoying! Enough said! Imagine opening your email inbox to check if you got that coupon you wanted. But you can’t because you have tens of other emails from random businesses. The problem with email marketing is that there is less monitoring and a bigger part of that is spam. Of course, your mail providers may work to automatically detect spam and junk as much as possible. However, they still go a step behind when it comes to filtering.
Perhaps the reason is that the laws are not as strict as for another channel. A lot of businesses buy a database of their demographics and start sending these emails. Since the cost is little to nothing, it does not matter. However, it matters to the receiver. Spam is very annoying. On top of that, it is dangerous. Spam emails can hack into your systems, steal your account information, data, or do even more damage than necessary.
Hence, email marketing becomes less and less likely to be the perfect marketing channel. - Open rate
While everyone may have their goals, the general goal of marketing is business promotion and getting revenue. Hence, it is important to have the right kind of audience when you are marketing and advertising your business. While emails may still be a common way of communication, it still has a very low open rate. Stats say the general open rate of emails is only about 18%-20%. Moreover, not everyone who opens the email will be your conversion. The math makes it much less ROI than with another channel. A study in North America in 2019 showed that the click-through rate on emails reduced to 2.9% only! Another survey showed that consumers say that only 1 out of every 4 emails is interesting enough to open.
The small open rate and clickthrough rate make email marketing quite questionable in general. Hence, it is time to switch to an alternate! - Desensitization
People have become desensitized to email marketing. This simply means that the channel is so overused that people don’t care anymore about it. Back when it was new and popular, it made sense! However, an average person receives 121 emails PER DAY! Imagine if you were getting these many letters. Would you read them?
Maybe the first few times. However, then you know the pattern. You know that there is nothing important enough to read. Consumers generally unsubscribe from lists. However, the outlook is endless.
In short, people don’t care about emails and that makes email marketing, perhaps, a very faulty way to send out promotions in this age. - Direct response marketing
Of course, in the end, you have the biggest question. Why even use something like email marketing? Why not stick to plain old advertising?
This is called direct response marketing. This is a type of sales technique that is used to trigger an instant response directly from a particular customer. The direct response allows businesses to have a more one-to-one conversation type advertising approach to have a quicker ROI and better management of KPI measurements.
Hence, if the email isn’t working out best, you need another form of direct response marketing that is more effective and welcoming.
Why is text marketing a better alternative?
Of course, you may think about why you need to switch to text marketing when there are other ways of direct marketing. The most common one is telemarketing and now, social media marketing! Here are a few ways why text marketing works better than any other channel out there.
Open Rate
We discussed how the email open rate is only about 20%. Against that, texting has an open rate of up to 98%. This means that out of all the billions of messages that are sent out every day, 98% of them are opened. Moreover, the response rate is in about 90 seconds. This means that texts that 75% of texts that are received get a response within 90 seconds.
This exceptional open rate allows businesses to get a very quick ROI. Moreover, you can at least have the assurance that a big chunk of your audience has probably read (or even skimmed) through your text message.
Spam filters
Text marketing laws are quite strict. Moreover, they are monitored very strictly. Hence, there is a thin chance of spamming. If you get spam messages, you can report them and there will be serious consequences. However, text marketing is the safest of almost all direct response marketing channels. Of course, it is still not 100% safe from spam. However, you can do much more to control it. We have a short guide on how to control spam. Click on the picture to read it.
Permission-based
Imagine you go door to door selling your product. There are about 10 houses. You know that out of the 4 are highly interested and waiting for you to come over to sell your product. They especially invited you over for you to sell your products. Of course, it is a thick chance that they will buy the product, it just depends on how you present it.
On the other hand, you have the other six houses that are a good demographic for your product. Going there to sell your product is a shot in the dark. You may or may not even be heard, let alone present your product.
Going to the four almost sure-shots is going to be much fruitful than the six houses that may not even answer the door. This is because those four houses explicitly invited you over.
This is exactly what permission-based and direct response marketing are about. In-text marketing, you only can send messages to people who have to give your prior express consent. This means that they are voluntarily inviting your business to send promotions and updates. These people become your highest intent audience and you get a quicker ROI with them around.
Permission-based marketing saves a lot of time, effort, and even money. Of course, you need a service like ExpertTexting that offers prepaid pricing to spend the credits that you use only
Moreover, permission-based marketing allows you to easily track and monitor your KPIs. Click on the image to read more about it.
ExpertTexting as an Email Marketing Alternative
ExpertTexting is a mass texting service that allows you to send your business promotions via text marketing. It has all the goodness of text marketing and that too in a prepaid plan. No annual or monthly subscriptions. Moreover, your credits don’t expire!
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