Email Marketing During Lockdown

Over the last three months we have seen a need for clients to communicate with prospects and customers more quickly than ever before, often delivering content within accelerated timescales. Many of these clients have developed new or adapted products and have chosen email marketing as the preferred delivery method.

The increased demand for email campaigns is shown by a 456% increase in the number of emails we have sent on behalf of clients during April-June against the same period in 2019.

Why Email Marketing?

During the lockdown period many of the UKs workforce have been furloughed as part of the Governments job retention scheme. According to Government statistics, at the beginning of the scheme 3.8m jobs had been furloughed with the figure standing at 9.4m on the 5^th July. This has not just hit the retail and hospitality sectors as over 1.1m business have at least 1 employee furloughed at the start of July. For those that have not been furloughed, with the exception of our frontline workforce, most are working from home.

This has inevitably meant that reaching out to promote your business and products is harder, with contacts either working from home or on furlough. For those working from home, they may be having to juggle childcare, home schooling or not have full access to their telephone systems.

Increased engagement with email campaigns

The impact of this has meant that in the last 3 months compared to the equivalent period last year open rates have significantly increased. The average open rate has increased by a massive 38% as people have more time to consume the emails that they receive. It is also true that people have the flexibility to read and engage with the emails when convenient with them – allowing them to work around commitments such as childcare and home schooling.

Not all stats are quite as positive with click rates being more temperamental. We have seen campaigns where click rates are significantly higher than last year but also campaigns where they are roughly similar or even down on the previous year.

How to ensure engagement with your email marketing?

The key to ensuring that your campaign not only takes advantage from the increased open rates at the moment but delivers further engagement and ROI is to get the basics right. These include:

• Think about your copy, make it engaging, interesting and mobile responsive
• Quality over quantity; ensure that you don’t over communicate and also that your mailing list is suitable for your product and offering
• Use personalisation in a natural way; add relevant details to your copy where appropriate

Multi-channel marketing is still crucial

Email marketing is proving very successful to generate awareness and leads at the moment but this doesn’t mean that you should abandon additional channels. B2B marketing campaigns will still have the most success when they are complimented by additional channels such as telemarketing, direct mail or social media.

We recently launched a Q&A with one of our clients, the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, who were kind enough to share their insight on how they make email marketing work for them.

If you are looking to carry out prospect email marketing then speak to one of our team who can ensure your campaign is planned and executed to deliver maximum impact.