There are those who ould say email marketing is dead. The digital marketing landscape is constantly shifting. That said, if you are just setting out on the rocky road of marketing, you have probably heard a lot of myths surrounding email marketing.
So, is email marketing dead? ABSOLUTELY NOT. Email marketing is one of the most successful digital marketing strategies and remains one of the most cost-effective ways to reach potential customers today. This is truer considering that there are 4 billion people actively using email. After all, if email marketing was dead, bloggers, affiliate marketers, small businesses, and generally marketers would not continue using it as one of the tools to reach their customers.
If you’re a beginner and have heard that email marketing is dead, the truth is that email marketing remains the best way to attract and retain customers.
Still on the fence about the subject? This post will discuss everything about email marketing to help you understand how you can use the strategy to improve marketing, eventually reaching more customers.
Table of Contents
Understanding Email Marketing
Email marketing is a powerful and highly effective digital marketing strategy that solely relies on email to promote business products and services.
You can integrate email marketing into your marketing automation efforts to make customers aware of the latest items, discounts, and other offers that you may have. Some marketers also use emails to educate prospects on the value of their brand.
In a nutshell, email marketing plays a pivotal role in marketing strategy and building a lasting relationship or keeping customers engaged. Effective email marketing can easily convert prospects into customers and turn one-time buyers into loyal customers.
According to this article by optinmonster, people who buy products promoted through email marketing spend 138% more than those who do not receive email offers. For business, email marketing has a return on investment of 4,400%, which is significant and, of course, impressive.
Another exciting thing about email marketing is that the strategy allows you to reach particular customers, making it easy to tailor marketing messages.
Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Not Dead
As email is not a new technology, it is an integral part of most people’s lives. That said, more than one-half of email users open their emails on a daily basis. That tels you, email marketing isn’t dead, just like the email itself is not dead.
Emails are an essential aspect of the growth and management of any business. Here are reasons justifying that email marketing is not dead.
1. Email Helps Reach Customers Quickly And Efficiently
Email marketing is a great way to communicate directly with your customer because it gives you a direct line to the email inboxes of all your subscribers.
Indeed, 91% of US adults like receiving promotional emails from companies they have subscribed to. What is more, because people check their emails daily, meaning your email is likely to be viewed.
Communicating with email is almost instantaneous, which helps you to reach customers quickly and efficiently.
Due to this immediate delivery and considering that almost 22% of emails are opened within the first one hour of being sent, businesses that use email marketing can start seeing results even within minutes of their emails being sent.
To be very strategic and get more clicks, you can use a more brilliant marketing ploy like sharing 24-hour sales and offers that create a sense of urgency and convince your subscribers to take immediate action.
2. 4 billion people use email
Despite being one of the older channels in the digital marketing space, email marketing is still alive and doing well. The latest reports show that over 4.1 billion people are using email, which means more than half of the world’s population is using email.
It is also not uncommon for consumers and prospects to check their email dozens of times every day.
With about 58% of US consumers checking their email first thing in the morning, you can leverage the power of email marketing to reach an extremely wide audience.
After all, how can email marketing be dead when more than 50% of the world’s population uses email?
3. You Can Reach People On Any Device
Time is gone when people could only open their emails on desktops or laptops. More and more people are indeed preferring using their smartphones over computers.
Thankfully, smartphones are computers in our pockets, which makes it easy for customers to access emails right from their smartphones – the open rate for emails on mobile devices has grown up to around 80%
To ensure all your customers enjoy a seamless experience when opening your promotional emails, all you need is to do is optimize the messages for all devices. Just like optimizing websites for multiple devices, optimizing your emails for multiple devices (especially smartphones) can make or break your marketing.
4. Gets People Back To Your Site
Email marketing is far and away one of the most successful ways to advertise your business, create and increase brand awareness, and drive traffic to your website.
Whether you are selling products online or simply wanting to increase traffic to your website, email marketing campaigns can help.
By sharing emails with your customers and prospects, you distribute content but can also embed useful links pointing to your website. For instance, if you are promoting a product, adding a link that redirects the reader to your site will certainly boost traffic.
If someone has stopped visiting your website, sending them an email reminds them that they can get help by visiting your website. Ultimately, this will bring more traffic to your site or store and increase sales.
5. Email Marketing ROI
Everybody craves impressive returns and, in the world of business, results are all that matters. That said, the latest email marketing statistics show that email generates an average of $44 for every $1 spent, meaning an ROI (return on investment) of 4400%.
With effective email marketing, you can even get a higher return on investment. Considering that the return on ad spend is $38 for every one dollar spent, it is clear that email marketing is growing to be more valuable.
6. Email Marketing Drives Sales Over A Lifetime
Email marketing is a powerful way to maximize your online marketing efforts. When done correctly, it can build stronger relationships, increase customer loyalty, and, most importantly, increase your customer lifetime.
This is because you provide your customers with the information they want directly into their inbox consistently.
When you offer value and make their life better, they will learn to trust you and stay. In this regard, 59% of marketers who used segmented campaigns say that email is their biggest source of ROI, plus they get a 760% increase in revenue due to email marketing campaigns.
7. Email Marketing Is Cost-Effective
Many marketers swear that email marketing is one of the most cost-effective ways of marketing your business. Relative to other digital marketing channels, email promotions are fast, low-cost, and designing custom emails doesn’t eat much of your time.
Sharing promotional emails provides a cheaper solution that allows you to reach customers directly.
8. Allows You To Stay In Contact And Build A Relationship
Can a channel that keeps you connected to your customers be termed dead? That is email marketing.
Email marketing is an effective communication tool that allows you to stay in contact with your customers and build a relationship with them. In essence, it gives you the ability to stay at the top of the mind and keep people engaged with your business even when you are busy or during the slower times of the year.
9. Easy To Automate And Track
When talking about the benefits of email marketing and why anyone would consider the strategy, we cannot ignore the measurability of emails.
It is very easy to generate email marketing metrics, where you can visualize the number of recipients who opened your email (open rate), those who unsubscribed, and the number of clicks.
Besides tracking, you can also automate your marketing efforts to ensure your emails are timely, personalized, and hyper-relevant to the recipient. Email automation increases your open rate and triggers most of your recipients to click, eventually bringing traffic to your site.
10. Target People By Segmentation
Email marketing is best at delivering messages and has a larger reach, all depending on the number of subscribers you have. Interestingly, it allows for segmentation, offering you an easy way to send personalized, powerful, and persuasive emails to your subscribers.
Segmentation makes it easy for you to design and craft marketing messages that speak directly to each of your target audiences.
Take for example people who have put something in the cart but didn’t buy. These people can be segmented out and you can send an email to them for a discouont on the item they put in the cart. Many times this will incentivize people to come back and make the purchase and it costs you nothing to do it.
11. Build Brand Recognition
When you communicate with your audiences regularly, they naturally become more aware of your brand and what it stands for or what it offers.
Through email marketing, your subscribers become familiar with the products and services you offer, as well as the business as a whole.
To get started building your brand check out our free guide on how t build a website.
Conclusion
Email marketing is one of the most reliable and cost-effective ways of promoting your products and services. Despite many people speaking ill of it, it continues to be one of the most successful digital marketing channels that anyone can leverage and get an impressive return on investment.