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    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers

    StreamSend, a leading email marketing service, shows businesses why email can make the most of their holiday email and social marketing investment.

    “The holidays are a good time for businesses to step back and look at the big marketing picture, especially where their biggest gift comes from – high ROI,” said Dan Forootan, president of StreamSend Email Marketing. “For most, the answer is email, which consistently has the highest conversion rate of all channels. Email generates the same amount of page views as search, but with a higher add-to-cart rate and higher conversion rate. It also generates four times the conversion rate of social. And email is evolving, its effectiveness growing as it leverages automatic tools and social media to deliver highly profitable customer relationships. There is no better time to leverage this power than the holidays, when success can make or break a business. Here are five big reasons why it works.”

    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers - slide 1

    Click through for five reasons businesses should include email in their holiday marketing plans, as identified by StreamSend.

    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers - slide 2

    There are 3.6 billion email accounts in 2013. By 2016, the number will reach 4.3 billion (The Radicati Group). Considering that 95 percent of online consumers use email, and that most of them check their email at least once a day, that is unparalleled penetration.

    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers - slide 3

    Despite the huge number of potential followers reached, ROI and social have had a shaky relationship. Not so with email marketing, on which Experian reports that for every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment. That adds up to a subscriber value based on solid metrics like growth, open rates, click rates, unsubscribes, etc. — metrics that can give you a clear view of sales and revenue.

    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers - slide 4

    Nothing works as well as email marketing and nothing leverages that power like sharing it out to the social world. Whether responding to comments, offering a video or asking people to take action, visit a store or read a newsletter, social offers a huge opportunity to connect with customers by posting on a regular basis. Then multiply the value of social contacts by moving them to the email marketing list. Using tools that are fast, automatic and free — including re-sending email offers to those who didn’t open – email can drive social interaction then convert social followers into customers. And that’s a powerful conversion: according to Litmus, 82 percent of consumers open emails from companies whose brands they trust.

    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers - slide 5

    Businesses now have the opportunity to email social shares automatically, increasing engagement, news feed showing and traffic. Emailing shares automatically increases engagement as people see businesses’ posts, visit them and choose to engage or like. Meanwhile, the businesses’ other posts get bumped up in those viewers’ news feeds. And because it’s automatic, businesses can set it and forget it. Increased engagement also increases businesses’ social news feed showing – automatically. There is no further action marketers have to take, except get back to their business.

    Five Reasons Why Email Works to Reach Holiday Shoppers - slide 6

    Use share boards to automatically engage the audience according to the topics that interest them most. Share boards amplify your reach across multiple social networks; they are smart landing pages where visitors can share that content to any social network, embed it on their site, email it to others, or opt-in to your email list. Not only is that email engagement automatic, it’s reliably valuable: ExactTarget has found 77 percent of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing communications through email.

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