Why You Need an Email Marketing Strategy for Your Online Community

With the advent of video, social messaging, artificial intelligence, and the like, you would be forgiven for viewing email as a bit outdated.

But this assumption couldn’t be further from the truth! In 2019, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received each day and this figure is expected to jump to 347.3 billion in 2023!

The truth is that email is one of the most powerful communication channels for engaging and growing your community – at a low cost and on a mass scale. In fact, email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel!

Deliver Your Message Directly to Your Community

Keeping in touch with members is an essential part of community management. Sure, your primary communication channel with your community will be your online platform. But email cannot be overlooked. You need to create welcome emails, registration emails, notification emails, confirmation emails, newsletters, and more!

Newsfeed posts have a short shelf life and quickly disappear. Email on the other hand flies straight into the recipient's inbox and can be easily found later on. It is an important and direct touchpoint that allows you to not only strengthen relationships with existing members but to grow your community.

Create Way More Targeted Communication

Email marketing software enables you to segment your contacts based on each member’s data. This means you can send way more targeted content to your audience! 

Let’s look at an example. 

You’re running a networking event for entrepreneurs in a certain location. Instead of shooting an invitation to your whole database that includes members that live too far from the event and members who wouldn’t be interested in the event topic, you could create a segment of members who are entrepreneurs and live within 30 miles of the event! 

You can create segments based on any relevant data you have in your database. This means you can delight and engage your members with the most appropriate content for them.

Email Automation and Identifying Community Champions

You can also send out trigger-based emails that are automatically sent to a member based on their behavior. Trigger emails can include welcome emails, password reset emails, thank you emails, reminder emails, and more! Triggered emails are sent to your members at the right time and show that you are paying attention to them!

Email marketing data can also enrich your data. Look at who is opening and interacting with your communications to help identify power users and community champions.