What is Email Marketing? 7 Reasons to Use Email
Overview:
Marketers have never had access to such a wealth of resources and innovation as they do today. According to VentureBeat, there are 1,876 marketing companies across 43 different categories, such as SEO, social, video marketing, sales enablement, mobile analytics, and dozens more.
As well, many of the categories in the report weren’t there a year ago.
Nevertheless, email marketing continues to perform well year after year. Email generates the highest return on investment for marketers for the tenth consecutive year. Email marketing generates an ROI of $38 for every dollar spent and has the broadest reach of all the channels available to marketers. Many marketing tools exist, but email marketing is still the most effective.
Our guide will reveal seven reasons why email marketing should be a cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy, as well as how experts use email marketing as a core tactic to reach their digital goals.
7 Reasons Email Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow
Today’s marketers must accomplish more with fewer resources. To stay on budget, they must connect with their audience on a highly personal level. Those marketers who can connect with their prospects and customers in a highly targeted way will succeed in delivering ROI and revenue to their business.
In the VentureBeat report, email marketing is found to be the only marketing category with longevity. In the VentureBeat report, email marketing is found to be the only marketing category with longevity.
Email remains the most powerful channel available to modern marketers, regardless of whether some marketing trends come and go.
These are 7 of the reasons why:
Email Marketing Has a Wider Reach
Considering Facebook has over 1 billion active users and Twitter has 255 million users, it’s tempting to believe social media is the most effective means of reaching the masses. Statistics on email usage aren’t often shared, but they’re just as impressive.
According to Radicati, there were 3.9 billion email accounts worldwide in 2013 and 4.9 billion by 2017. You need to enter your email address when you create an account at a website (like an online store). This may seem odd at first but think about your online behavior. Creating an account on Facebook or Twitter requires an email address. In addition, Facebook and Twitter email users when there is activity, such as when someone is tagged in a photo.
Everyone online has an active email address, which is the currency of the web. As for Facebook and Twitter, although they may seem pretty ubiquitous, the ongoing struggle over data breaches and privacy is causing many people to leave some social media channels.
There is no better way to connect with prospects and customers than through email.
Email Marketing Conveys Your Message
When it comes to deciding between adding a subscriber to their email list or gaining a new Facebook fan, marketers should always opt for the email list.
There are two main reasons for this:
In the first place, 90% of emails are delivered to the recipient’s inbox, but only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. As a result, Facebook limits how many times your posts appear in the News Feed to encourage brands to pay for advertising.
If you want your messages to be seen by the right people, this is a very important step.
Only 200 of your 10,000 Facebook fans will see your update if you post it to them. A campaign sent to 10,000 subscribers will be received by at least 9,000 users.
In other words, your email message has a 45 times as high a chance of being seen as one on Facebook.
The second reason is that your email subscribers have explicitly said they would like to hear from you when they subscribed to your mailing list.
SPAM laws are strict, so if you’re emailing a prospect or customer, it’s because they’ve permitted you to do so. Imagine the ads that appear in your Facebook News Feed – did you ask those companies to market to you? Most likely not. Instead, you most likely looked up their website or performed a Google search. That’s a significantly different approach than signing up proactively through an email newsletter. It has been proven that email ensures your message reaches your audience.
Email Marketing Drives Conversions
The majority of marketers are laser-focused on driving conversions. The goal of marketers is to convert prospects into paying customers, regardless of whether they measure it with leads, sales, memberships, or a metric unique to their business strategy.
In terms of conversions, email is far and away from the most powerful channel.
An email campaign has an average click-through rate of around 3% (of total recipients), while a tweet has an average click-through rate of around 0.5%.
You have a 6x greater chance of getting someone to click through to your website via email than you do from Twitter. With email, your subscribers want to hear from you, but this isn’t typically the case with social media. According to a survey conducted by Monetate, 4.24 percent of visitors from email marketing buy something, as opposed to 2.49% from search engines and 0.59 percent from social media. Furthermore, email is highly measurable. With Campaign Monitor, you can see metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, forwards, social shares, and more in real-time.
As an additional benefit, those who integrate their email marketing into Salesforce will be able to see firsthand how the marketing affects business opportunities and deals.
Email marketing is the best communication channel for any marketer focused on nurturing leads and driving conversions, as most marketers are.
Email Marketing Has a Higher ROI
With email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it is no surprise that email is also the best marketing channel for driving ROI. Email marketing yields an average return on investment of 3,800% for businesses, and for every $1 invested, the return on investment is $38.
Based on these statistics, it is evident that email is a cost-effective channel for marketers. But why does email outperform other channels so significantly in terms of ROI?
The key is to deliver highly personalized and relevant messages. As opposed to social networks where you update your status to every follower regardless of their location, interests, or purchase history, email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications.
Your email marketing campaigns will be more targeted if you have more data about your customers in a tool such as a Campaign Monitor, including information pulled from integrated systems such as your CRM and customer service solution.
Rip Curl, a Campaign Monitor customer, used segmentation and dynamic content to deliver the right message to the right audience. By knowing the gender and location of their subscribers, they can ensure that female subscribers in the United States receive an email about bathing suits during the summer months and male subscribers in Australia receive an email about wetsuits during the winter months. With segmentation and dynamic content, they can ensure the content they send is tailored to each recipient, which leads to more click-throughs, purchases, and higher ROI for their email marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing is the Best Communication Channel
Keeping up with friends and family on social media is a personal form of communication for many. Logging into social media accounts allows people to see photos and updates from friends and family.
In contrast, email is a much more professional medium, and people expect to receive information about products and services via email.
Email Marketing is an Open Platform
Millions of dollars have been spent in the past few years on buying large social followings to engage with an audience.
Despite businesses investing in various social media platforms, Facebook frequently updates its algorithm to reduce the number of followers who will see a brand’s posts, unless these posts are paid advertisements.
As a result, 98% of brand followers won’t see the posts in their News Feeds. With Twitter’s announcement that it will introduce an algorithm-controlled feed as well, it appears to be moving in the same direction.
In channels such as Facebook and Twitter, the third parties are in control of the platform, so marketers are dependent on whatever changes they make to the platform.
Moreover, email is not controlled or owned by any particular entity. The platform is open, and it offers a variety of services that make it possible to send and receive emails.
As the number of companies involved in email marketing is diverse, no one company can make changes that will have a widespread impact, and unlike Facebook or Twitter, your subscriber list will become a valuable asset if you invest time and money into building and cultivating one. Consequently, you’ll be able to leverage your list without the threat of someone limiting its effectiveness.
Email Marketing will Be Around Forever
Do you remember MySpace? What about that?
Between 2005 and 2008, the site was the largest social network in the world, and in 2006 it surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. But what happened to MySpace? The site is now the 1,500th most popular website in the United States after all of those users moved to other social networks.
Consider investing significant time and money to build an audience on a platform only to discover that it is a ghost town just a year or two later. This would have a catastrophic effect on your ability to reach and engage potential customers.
In contrast, email has a long history of stability. An email has grown steadily since 1978 when the first campaign was sent to 400 recipients.
Interestingly enough, the email space itself has evolved from a time when you had to hire a developer to send an email to today, where tools like Campaign Monitor allow any marketer to create and send beautiful branded emails with ease. As a result, more people have access to the power of business email.
It pays off many years in the future to build your email list, unlike building an audience on social media.