With the proliferation of various marketing directions, such as influencer marketing, guerrilla marketing, push marketing, and many others, some may think that email marketing has sunk into oblivion.
This is a common misconception, though.
In 2019, email marketing still has a global reach and prevalence. According to the Radicati Group, the worldwide growth in the number of email accounts only strengthens email marketing’s importance. In the last four years, the number of email accounts increased from 1.1 billion to 5.2 billion, which is more than half of the world’s population. On a daily basis, 139.4 billion emails are sent.
Despite the popularity of other marketing tools, email marketing remains the dominant and omnipresent lead generation machine, touching almost every existing business. So it’s no surprise that email marketing specialists are in great demand and email marketing metrics are proof of the channel’s durability among other competitive marketing tools.
Although the very number of email users speaks for itself, let’s consider other impressive facts about email and relevant arguments explaining why email marketing is important today and why it will only flourish in the years to come.
As much as social media channels prove to be an effective way of interacting with users, converting users into customers or buyers requires direct communication in a deeper and strictly personal manner.
Moreover, an adept email marketing specialist can use emails to encourage the desired users’ actions and drive demand. Triggered and segmented emails, quality newsletters, and shareable content are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to email marketing lead generation. Effective user acquisition campaigns hinge on deciphering user behavior and interests, allowing for finely tuned marketing messages that drive engagement and conversions.
Dedicated email tactics for different types of users will do what no social media can do: Create targeted and individualized content for diversified communities, improving both click-through and overall conversion rates. Relying on emarketer’s research back from 2016, email marketing is considered the best choice for boosting customer acquisition and keeping high retention rates (81 percent and 80 percent, respectively), and is even more effective than organic search.
Email marketing remains the favorite choice for the majority of retailers in 2019. A study from Shop.org and Forrester Research revealed the telling 85 percent of U.S. retailers prefer this marketing channel as the best tool for their acquisition strategies.
In comparison to the PPC, influencer marketing, or offline advertising, email marketing costs practically nothing. This is a compelling argument for the majority of small businesses and a very cost-effective and powerful way of generating impressive ROI for both small and large ventures.
According to the Direct Marketing Association, every $1 spent for email marketing brings back an ROI of $44.
Digital Marketing Philippines concluded that 73 percent of the world’s marketers said email marketing is a channel that delivers good to excellent ROI.
Unlike social media channels, where posts in the newsfeed often get overlooked, email marketing boasts the highest delivery rate. This, combined with an enormous user base, ensures the vast potential for scaling up your marketing efforts.
Mailmunch’s survey proves this fact. They concluded that the average click-through rates for each channel is:
Email marketing 3.57%
Facebook 0.07%
Twitter 0.03%
In other words – email generated 174% more total conversions than social media.
Times of manual operations are long gone. Modern email capacities allow for high-process workflow automation and a significant boost in your reach. Flexible email settings of most clients are easily adjustable, not to mention the dedicated email marketing services presented in abundance on the market.
At this point, you do not need to hire a whole team since one email marketing specialist can automate your overall marketing strategy and create quality and personalized content to share with your would-be customer base.
Existing marketing automation tools, such as Constant Contact, SendinBlue, Mailjet, Drip, ConvertKit, AWeber, MailChimp, and GetResponse, help prepare the best content solutions for your email campaigns. For example, the included A/B testing feature allows you to evaluate the performance of two different versions of a subject line or a body of your letter to choose the more effective ones and apply them to the leading campaign, thus, increasing the overall email marketing lead generation rate.
By implementing your thought-through marketing tactics via specialized automated services, you make the win-win choice, saving time, effort and considerable costs.
Automated services bring along another significant business advantage: precise and up-to-date statistics of your marketing efforts. The daily insights on the promotional strategy help adjust marketing moves and monitor all sorts of data: open rate, CTR, unsubscribe rate, bounce rate, and conversion rate. Some services allow for tracking customers from email receipt to the purchase.
Email marketing metrics, provided they’re renewed non-stop and properly analyzed, provide knowledge of your user base and harbor the key to creating a successful marketing strategy.
Without the solid data obtained through your analytical sources, it’s impossible to create an effective email marketing funnel that brings home the bacon. And every experienced marketer knows how important having success in attracting customers is in the whole campaign.
While the traditional stages of the funnel do not apparently correlate with marketing KPIs, its development bears direct interdependence with the analytics underlying its creation.
Usually, these stages are the following:
The great thing about the email marketing funnel is that it’s your own property. Unlike social media platforms, where you have no actual control over the policy or the algorithm it’s running on, email offers a high degree of freedom and stability.
Apart from the major reasons why email marketing is important, there are minor reasons too.
For example, do you know any marketing source offering the same personalization capacities? You won’t argue that personalization is a crucial factor nowadays. While social networks are just starting to encourage it in newsfeeds and ads by adjusting core algorithms, mailing services have been successfully providing this valuable feature for years.
Scalability is the next benefit of email campaigns. The size of your operation is always up to you, and only you can decide if you wish to either scale your business or shrink it down for a while.
Emails are easy. Yes, you’ll need to spend some time learning your user base, checking your email marketing metrics and building your email marketing funnel, but in terms of implementation, mailing workflow is simple, especially if you use automated services. This advantage is gaining importance when you need to make prompt adjustments or initiate a complete change of course.
Email marketing also keeps track of your contacts list, organizing and supplementing that with additional user data.
Another useful perk is its compatibility with all existing desktop and mobile devices. Mobile is on top today, and it also is connected to email marketing, as billions of people are checking their emails daily via mobile devices no matter where they are and what they do.
Based on Techcrunch data, around 75 percent of 900 million Gmail users check their accounts via mobile devices. Despite the not-so-rapid growth in the number of new Internet users (under 10 percent per year), the increment of new smartphone users is well above 20 percent yearly. Email marketing lead generation on mobile can be considered one of the top priorities for marketing strategies of 2019-2020.
Email marketing is shareable, and thus, your list of potential customers can additionally grow with absolutely no input from your side, operating by mere viral sharing. In terms of campaigns’ effectiveness, it means that you can overstep a few stages of your email marketing funnel and go directly to the conversion, loyalty, and advocacy.
To sum up, we must mention the greatest advantage of using email marketing: the universality and durability of it. While social media hugely relies upon current trends and works with specific age groups, social layers, and even locations, emails are all-embracing and global. In some way, it can be compared to classical style in fashion; it cannot grow old.
Trends are changing, technology is on its edge of development, and yet emails seem to be the lasting and credible means of communication. With a solid and thought-through email marketing strategy, you are choosing both the safest and effective way of promoting your idea, service, or product.
At ReVerb, we are sure of the marketing means we’re using and we are happy to share our expertise with you. Our professional email marketing specialist will help you create a quick-win strategy and prepare for the fast growth of your business!