Email marketing is one of the unsung heroes of promotional marketing.
While social media ad campaigns might be getting all of the interest lately, don’t sweep email lists under the rug —while seemingly outdated, it’s actually one of the most powerful —and profitable— forms of marketing.
Email is everywhere —in fact, there are 3.9 billion daily email users. That number is projected to rise to 4.3 billion by 2023.
In terms of sheer size, email is an impressive platform to reach customers with and maintain contact with your existing ones.
However, despite its size and accessibility, content creators often forget about all of the attractive benefits the platform has to offer.
If you’re looking to genuinely increase your audience interaction and build your brand, then email marketing is a must.
For those that require a strong reason to begin using email marketing for their own business, here are 7 top reasons why your BOD business needs an email list.
1. It’s Long-Lasting
Worried that email is an outdated platform?
Think again.
Email has been around since 1971 and only continues to increase in both usage and relevance.
People all around the world use email as a means of both communication and connection. Everyday, people send updates to friends, get messages from their favorite brands, and contact employees from their workplace.
It’s been 50 years of email and email is still going strong. While email lists and email marketing might have a slightly outdated image, they remain relevant to today’s modern society.
78% of email marketers have noticed an increase in engagement over the past year.
That means that email isn’t just here to stay, it’s still continuing to grow and become more and more essential. That’s partly due to the sheer simplicity of email. Usage is easy —simply send and receive messages without any unnecessary bells or whistles.
In fact, many people project that email will outlast current popular social media platforms such as TikTok or Instagram for that exact reason; there will always be a need for communication and email makes it simple.
Since it’s anticipated to be around for a long, it’s best to start working on your email marketing material as soon as possible.
If you need accurate data and analytics about your subscribers in order to create the perfect email marketing campaign, Streampal offers a wealth of easy-to-understand marketing resources to all of its VOD users.
2. You Have Audience Permission
Increasingly, more and more users are distrustful of modern apps and platforms due to security breaches and the sale of personal data.
Platforms such as Facebook frequently receive complaints in regards to their decision to sell data to third-party sites, which then bother users with emails or ads using their private data.
However, if a customer has given you their email address to be added to an email list, that’s a different story.
Chances are, your subscribers love hearing from you. After all, they pay money to access your content.
They’ve also given you permission to access their email, something that gives them more agency and a stronger sense of control. Receiving a message after signing up for an email list doesn’t come as a surprise to customers —especially compared to other, invasive forms of marketing.
In fact, many customers might even look forward to receiving your weekly —or monthly— emails.
And if people are happy to receive updates on your content, then they’re much more likely to be happy to support your services.
3. No One Owns Email
Most VOD businesses already know the struggles of trying to build a business on a platform owned by another company.
Not only do content creators have to follow the rules and guidelines set by the platform, but they also do not have complete control over the financial aspects of their business.
This issue of ownership isn’t just a passive concern. VOD content creators have already experienced the negative effects that come from restrictive decisions made by big platforms, such as YouTube demonetization.
Putting control of your finances into the hands of other platforms can be severely detrimental —that’s because at any point, they can cut off your source of income without warning.
Email is everywhere. And if you have an email list, no other platform can take that list away from your business.
Email marketing gives you consistent access to your customers that isn’t dependent on marketing crashes, unsteady algorithms, industry trends, or the collapse of social platforms.
If your entire business strategy was built around promotions on Vine, when the platform collapsed, all of your promotional reach collapsed along with it.
By using email lists and email marketing instead of relying solely on social media marketing, you ensure that you can retain access to your customers and carry on successful marketing campaigns, no matter what else happens.
4. It’s Incredibly Easy to Access:
Email can be accessed on any number of devices —laptops, desktops, smartphones, at home or at the workplace— which makes it an essential part of our daily lives.
It’s also used by people of all ages and from nearly all countries. Whatever type of target customer you’re hoping to reach with your ad campaigns, chances are they use email.
In fact, 35% of business professionals (aka people with enough income to be your paying subscribers) reported that they checked their email on a mobile phone.
That means that people are using their email daily, not just as a form of leisure, but also for professional reasons as well. This gives them the incentive to check their email often —and to check out your email when it arrives in their inbox.
Compared to other forms of promotion, email marketing doesn't require much logging in or logging out. Most people have their emails automatically sent to their phones for easy access.
Email lists do not require huge amounts of customization either. All you need to do is draft one email to mass send and then send it along to all of the email addresses on your list.
While other marketing campaigns might require eye-catching details specific to each platform, email marketing is simple: with one click, you can easily reach a huge number of people.
Sit back, relax, and watch the results come in!
5. Email’s ROI is Impressive
Email generates $38 for every $1 spent on marketing —making it one of the most effective forms of promotion for your content.
Therefore, an email list is an absolute must for your VOD business to include in its marketing campaign.
To be more specific, ROI stands for return on investment and measures how much money is gained or lost following an investing decision. Email has such a high ROI because the cost to create an email list is low, but the results are rewarding.
Many consider email marketing to be one of the top three best forms of marketing for receiving a high ROI, including SEO marketing and PPC ad campaigns.
Compared to other, traditional forms of marketing, email marketing doesn't require a huge budget. VOD businesses can reach their clients easily without having to invest a large portion of their finances into the effort.
Don’t be tempted to devote all of your marketing budget to social media ad campaigns. Email marketing has been found to be 40 times more effective than other media platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook.
That’s a return on investment that pays off big over time.
6. Success is Simple to Measure
Measuring the success of marketing campaigns can be a tricky business.
Sometimes, it can be seemingly impossible to tell how much influence a certain ad had over a consumer’s purchase or subscription. This is especially true for traditional marketing methods used on social media or ads placed in papers or videos.
However, that’s simply not the case for email marketing.
Email provides clear metrics about the success of the email list, such as bounce rates, click-through rates, unsubscribe rates, and more.
The easier it is to measure success, the easier it is to make your marketing campaign more effective.
You can easily see the direct effect of any changes in your email marketing, such as sending more frequent emails or by introducing new elements, such as videos.
Make marketing for your VOD business easier by starting email lists!
7. Saves Money
For many VOD businesses, especially VOD content creators trying to expand their brand to reach larger audiences, there is not a lot of spare revenue to invest in marketing.
While marketing is undeniably one of the most important aspects of running a successful VOD business, it can occasionally come at a startling high cost.
That’s not the case for email marketing.
While the percentage and amount of your marketing budget that you choose to invest into email marketing will vary depending on your VOD brand’s size, most businesses invest on average 16% of their total marketing budget to email lists.
As discussed before, the ROI of email marketing is incredibly high. That means it takes far less money from your budget to achieve effective results.
So, save up your money and invest it into other aspects of your business instead!
How to Build Your Own Own Email List
By now, it should be obvious that your VOD business should be actively using email marketing in all of your ad campaigns.
But how can you start?
Fear not —email marketing and creating an email list is incredibly easy to do.
First, sign up for an email list provider. There are plenty that offer free services for users under a certain subscriber amount, such as MailChimp or ConvertKit. If you have a large number of subscribers to your email list, then these companies will begin to charge a monthly fee.
By signing up for these services, you can easily start to complete all of the essential email marketing steps, such as:
- Gathering your subscriber’s email addresses
- Craft your marketing emails
- Safely store email addresses in a database
- Quickly send mass emails to your audience
- And more!
Carefully consider your audience size, budget, and the application’s fit with your current website design before signing up for the email list services.
Using these resources, email marketing for your VOD business becomes simple!
Conclusion
Email is here and it’s here to last.
Infuse email into your brand’s marketing campaign and watch as your engagement levels grow.
The power of email lists has been long documented and isn’t going anywhere. If you haven’t started email marketing yet, now’s the time to start.
And if you need a few reminders of the reasons to begin, here’s seven:
- Email is long-lasting
- Email gives you permission from your audience
- Email isn’t owned by any controlling company
- Email is easy to access
- Email offers great results
- Email’s success is easy to measure
- Email saves you money on marketing costs
After launching your own VOD streaming platform with Streampal, constantly marketing and promoting is essential for your brand's success —and that includes email marketing.
In fact, Streampal makes it easy to create email lists using your subscriber’s data. We provide quick and convenient access to your subscriber’s email addresses that can be easily exported and used to build your own email marketing campaign.
Pair the resources Streampal offers with an outside marketing provider, such as MailChimp, to supercharge your email marketing campaign and build up your VOD business.
