How Powerful can Email Marketing Be?

How powerful can email marketing be? It consistently ranks as one of the best ways to reach customers yet for some reason it is regularly on the backburner when it comes to conversations about marketing. As one of the top web development companies, we want to share with you exactly why this method is so effective so that you can also see how powerful email marketing is.

There are numerous tools in the marketing toolbox for reaching customers. A lot of talk is centered around the use of SEO, social media, video marketing, and mobile engagement. However, we feel that email does not get talked about as much as it should considering how good it really is when it comes to connecting you and your message to a target audience.

Reasons why email marketing is so powerful

• Timeless – Unlike other marketing methods which have come and gone, email remains timeless. Email has been in use for marketing purposes since 1978 although it wasn’t until the 1990’s that usage became more commonplace. Since that point email marketing has consistently provided results while at the same time other platforms have disappeared; MySpace anyone?
• High ROI – According to a Litmus survey earlier this year, the average reported ROI for email marketing at 38:1 which is much higher than the ROI of other digital channels. Email consistently has had a very good ROI over the years regardless of new platforms and channels rising and falling in popularity. A consistently high ROI should never be ignored for a marketing channel.
• Reach – People often tout Facebook’s 1 billion active users as a reason to use the channel for marketing. Twitter also has a large user base of 255 million people. However, there are almost 4 billion email accounts. That is one of the biggest reasons why email marketing is powerful. Every single user on a social platform such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram uses an email to sign up for that platform. The reach of email is simply not comparable to other channels because email completely dominates the landscape.
• Preferred channel – Studies have shown that email is the preferred contact method for receiving offers and promotional content, beating out snail mail, print and TV ads, and all social platforms and apps. In fact, texts, social platforms, apps, and videos have very low preference ratings at under 20% for each compared to email which is over 70%. This makes complete sense as email is one of the few places that is still easily controlled, and we have the expectation of receiving information and offers for products and services.
• Open platform – Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms are owned entities and as such can make changes to how they do business whenever they want. For example, if Facebook decided to update their algorithms to show fewer posts from brands you are at their mercy from a marketing perspective. Email, on the other hand, is an open platform. While Google owns Gmail, Yahoo owns Yahoo Mail and the like, because of the number of players in the game nobody can make a change that will drastically change the landscape of email. If you have built a fantastic mailing list, that asset stays valuable regardless of which email platform you are using.
• Messaging – Messages are delivered much more easily compared to other platforms. On average, 90% of email gets delivered to inboxes while social media posts are only viewed by a small percentage of followers depending on notifications and settings of your followers. That means email gets your message out there to people more consistently. Additionally, email subscribers typically want the offers or information you are sending because they provided their email to you and have the option to unsubscribe. Feeds, on the other hand, sometimes include a business just because you viewed their website which means users are receiving unsolicited information.
• Conversions – Email’s click-through rate is consistently higher than other channels. That means you are much more likely to get people to actually visit your site and consider an offer which means more conversions. Additionally, because email is much easier to monitor when it comes to opens, clicks, and shares you can analyze performance better compared to other platforms.

The bottom line

The bottom line is that Email Marketing can be the most powerful marketing option in your arsenal. Obviously, it takes time and energy to develop a mailing list, learn about your audience so that you can craft the most effective messages, and selecting the best email marketing tools, but once you do the results are consistently better than every other option. The best part is how easy it is to get started. When you have limited time and resources available, it makes sense to prioritize your efforts around the tools that are the most effective.

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