Email Marketing is Alive and Well: Here’s Why

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Key takeaways

• Email marketing remains effective: there’s a 122% return on investment and also states $1 spent can return $40.
• Email builds deeper customer relationships affordably by collecting data to segment and personalize messages.
• Email lets you control who sees what content, creating a more exclusive, loyal-subscriber experience than public social channels.
• Email campaigns are easy to measure, delivery, open, click-through and retention metrics are straightforward to track and test.
• Email shares may be fewer but are taken more personally, which is linked to higher conversion rates than social sharing.

Introduction

You’ve heard the rumors: email marketing is dying and other “more progressive” platforms (like social media, and mobile) are taking its place. But, like any gossip, have you considered the source of this talk around the water cooler? It would be easy to surmise that a well-established platform that has been around for close to 40 years would be getting closer to the grave, being replaced by younger and sexier forms of advertising, but the simple fact is that this is not true. Email marketing brings in about a 122% return on investment, which far outstrips all other marketing strategies. What are some other great reasons to prioritize your email marketing campaigns?

Better Relationships

Emails allow you create “deeper relationships with more people at only a small amount of what traditional marketing costs”, says Steve Hamm in an article for Business 2 Community. It is is a great way to gain data about your customers and their behaviors and then further segment them so you can personalize and connect with them. You’ll be able to control who sees what information, which is something you can’t do on other platforms. This almost “secret society”, created by being an email subscriber, allows you to give those loyal customers greater benefits from receiving your messages than they would on other platforms.

Build Your Brand’s Value

Sure, social media is a great way to display exactly what your brand is about, but with your emails, you can strategically plan, create a “smart design,” and have completely targeted content that builds your brand’s value. Hamm says, “As you expose more people to your brand, when they need your product or service, they automatically come to you”.

Easy To Measure And Cost-Effective

Spending just $1 on your email marketing campaigns will bring in $40. These numbers show that email marketing outperforms all other platforms when it comes to ROI. It is super easy to track delivery, open rates, click-to-deliver numbers, subscriber retention and your customer’s behaviors. It is not so easy to analyze these things on social media and other newer platforms. As well, email makes it super easy for you to test the efficiency of a campaign. You can send different formats of your emails to separate segments of your list and gauge the reactions you get. Because email marketing offers precise tracking tools that aren’t always seen in other platforms, finding out what makes your customers tick is incredibly easy.

Easy To Share

Ok, so social media makes it easy for you to share, but in today’s super-connected world, there is such a thing as over-sharing, and nobody likes that. When you share something on social media, others may see it and share too, which will undoubtedly build a brand’s name. But picking from the pile of what’s been shared, unless your content is amazingly good, can make it easy to be overlooked. People may click and share, but do they truly engage? Emails are very easy to share as well; it is just one click of a button, but consumers don’t tend to forward emails unless it is something really meaningful to them, which is completely different than what you see on social media. This may mean that the receiver will take the share more seriously, read the email and end up converting. While the share rate may be lower on email, the conversion rate is higher because emails are taken more personal than content shared on social media.

When the naysayers come knocking to tell you that email is dead, you’ve now got the actual facts to let them know they are wrong. Email marketing is alive and well and better than ever. Pass it on.

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