With so many ways to reach consumers online, some digital marketers are starting to ask the below question:
“Is email marketing dead?”
Today, we have various media platforms where people spend time online: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and others.
While I’m a big fan of all these sites, I don’t see them taking away attention from email.
Email will continue to be an important marketing medium for some time. Maybe forever.
Email isn’t another avenue to connect with consumers online like every other platform. There’s something unique about email. It has something special other mediums will never have.
I have stats to back up claims in this article.
Email is the most popular daily online activity for adult internet users in the United States, according to Statista.
Internet users send or read email almost daily.
Email is the digital home of most internet users. Most sites ask for your email address when signing up.
If you want to attract, convert and retain customers, email remains the best place to do that.
Google and Bing may kick you out of their search engines.
Facebook may reduce your visibility on its platform to zero.
Twitter and Instagram may ban you from their platforms.
But once you have a customer email address, you have it forever. You can always reach customers via email.
Why You Should Invest More in Email Marketing
According to the Radicati Group, there were about 3.7 billion email accounts worldwide in February 2017. I do not doubt that there are more email accounts today.
The total number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day in 2017 was approximately 269 billion. That number will grow 4.4% over the next four years.
As you can see from the above image, the numbers of emails web users send and receive are both expected to continue to increase in the years ahead.
Currently, 85% of adult internet users send and receive email. Seventy-five percent of web users visit search engines. That means, more people use email than search engines on a daily basis.
In fact, today’s teenagers refer to email as “everyday life” according to Adestra. About 77% of teenagers use email every day.
According to the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) in the UK, 99% of consumers check their personal email daily. Some people check it up to 20 times a day.
Email is the best place to reach your audience.
Make sure your email message is accessible on every mail client. A mail client is where people view their email messages.
Here’s where web users open their emails:
- iPhone, 28%
- Gmail, 26%
- iPad, 11%
- Apple Mail, 7%
- Outlook, 6%
- Samsung Mail, 5%
- com, 4%
- Google Android, 3%
- Yahoo! Mail, 2%
- Windows Live Mail, 1%
iPhone, Gmail, and iPad are the top email clients.
For a good email list, at least, 98.3% of your subscribers will receive your emails, according to DMA Benchmarking Report in 2017.
That means most of your subscribers will most likely see your email. The same thing can’t be said for social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
Once a social media fan misses your post, he/she may never see it.
If a follower comes online two hours after your post was published, it would have been buried by hundreds of new updates.
It’s hard for consumers to see that you shared something 24 hours ago on Facebook or Twitter.
But they can always go back to the emails they’ve missed. In fact, most email users do that.
It’s important you collect emails without tricking consumers. Ask them politely. Only ask for someone for their email after they’d showed a genuine interest in your product or service.
Maybe you run a digital marketing agency or a law firm that specializes in estate planning like Elville when you collect emails from prospects who are genuinely interested, it’s easy to get them to open your emails.
What Consumers Think About Email Marketing
Let’s talk about consumers. What do they think about email marketing? Do they like it or hate it?
The answer is simple:
In contrast to what many marketers may believe, consumers love receiving emails from brands they’re connected with.
According to a study, consumers prefer communicating with brands through email than direct mail, mobile apps, social media and push notification.
Across various industries the study was conducted, consumers prefer receiving emails from brands.
For companies in the B2B space, email is the best, if not the only way to communicate with most prospects.
Most B2B prospects and customers are professionals. Professionals are busy people.
For example, if you want to reach a CEO or COO of an organization, email may be the best way to achieve that.
Both consumers and professionals prefer email when communicating with brands.
However, there’s an issue with email marketing consumers and professionals don’t like. Most brands send irrelevant emails to their subscribers.
DMA Insight reveals that 53% of consumers get too many irrelevant emails from brands.
Consumers hate spam emails or emails that aren’t relevant to them.
They sign up to receive messages that relate to them.
But, over time, brands start sending different emails about topics subscribers care little about.
For example, imagine giving a retail company your email so that you can receive notifications about discounts.
But as time goes by, you start receiving emails about new product releases. You care little about those. That’s not the reason you gave the retail company your email address.
Sending irrelevant messages to consumers is spam. Consumers hate spam.
About 17.3% of emails consumers receive are spam, according to the Radicati Group.
Don’t send emails that aren’t related to the needs of the subscriber.
When you send spam messages, it makes subscribers care less about your future emails.
Email platforms like iCloud, Gmail and Outlook will know when their users are ignoring your messages.
Subscribers can report your emails to these platforms.
When they do that, it means your emails will go to the spam folder next you send them new messages.
Before you send an email, ask yourself, is it the right message your subscribers will love to open and read?
Make your messages so interesting to consumers that they look forward to your emails.
Personalize your emails. Ensure that each email is personal and relevant to the recipient.
Most consumers see nothing wrong with a brand doing email marketing. They have problems with your emails when you aren’t doing it right, or when you’re trying to trick inside their own inbox.
What Email Marketers Think About Email Marketing
If you think email marketing is dead, ask those who are doing it right.
People who struggle with email marketing either don’t have an expert to guide them, or they’re not doing it the right way.
Experts will tell you that email marketing is rewarding.
Email marketers are blessed with lots of tools to help them personalize their offers. They can target consumers who are ready and can afford to buy.
Email marketing is developing rapidly. There are ten times more tools available today than they were ten years ago.
You can use these tools to do amazing things.
GrowthFunnel is one of these tools.
GrowthFunnel can help you collect visitors’ emails and address them using their first names when they return to your site.
Experienced email marketers know that it’s important for their messages to be relevant to subscribers. They work hard to create interesting content subscribers want to read.
DMA reported that 38% of marketers say some of their emails are relevant, while 9% of marketers were confident their emails are relevant.
This 9% know what they are doing. They know what their subscribers want and they give it to them.
Be part of the 9% of marketers who send relevant emails to their subscribers.
If most email marketers aren’t sending relevant and interesting content to their subscribers, it means you have a chance to stand out and impress your subscribers.
Test your emails more. The more you test, the more you learn about your subscribers.
You know the kind of messages that resonate and interest them.
Send messages they engage with. Send messages that make them take action.
Most email marketers believe that testing is the key to understanding subscribers.
DMA Insight reported that one in six email marketers conduct regular testing and only one in five don’t feel confident about testing.
Experienced and successful email marketers understand the importance of sending relevant email messages.
They know that to get subscribers’ attention and keep it, they have to send messages they care about.
So, before you conclude that email marketing is dead, it could be that you aren’t sending relevant messages to your subscribers.
Email Marketing Gives You the Biggest ROI
When someone asks if email marketing offers a good return on investment (ROI), it tells me they know little or nothing about email marketing itself.
Other marketing methods aren’t even close when it comes to returns email marketing can give you.
The ROI of email marketing is too good to ignore.
Various studies from marketing research firms and various digital marketers all found that email offers the best return.
Most consumers look to email when they want to buy from a company.
Chief Marketer found that the ROI of email is 28.5% better than direct mail.
According to the same study from Chief Marketer, the average response rate for letter-sized direct mail sent to houses was 3.4%. The average response rate for email was 0.12%.
Even though response rates for direct mail was 30 times more than email, the ROI from email was 28.5%.
When you compare that to 7% ROI for direct mail, it shows email is effective.
For every dollar spent on email marketing, there’s an average return of $40.
Why Email Marketing Will Continue to Remain the Best Marketing Medium
Since 1972 it was invented, email has stood the test of time.
Over the years, we’ve seen different platforms come and go.
For example, MySpace was once the most popular site in the United States, even surpassing Google. Today, it’s gone.
Platforms like Digg, GeoCities, and Yahoo used to be the most popular sites. Today, it seems like they never existed.
Despite the failings of many popular platforms online, email has managed to remain relevant.
Email is getting bigger each year.
It’s risky to build your business on online platforms. When they go, they take your business with them.
These platforms can also shut down your profile without the need to inform you. They own their platform. They can do whatever they want with it.
You have to follow their rules or get kicked out.
Facebook shut down the profile of Felix Baumgartner, a world-famous skydiver, in 2016. He had over a million fans at the time.
That’s why it makes sense to build an email list. You own your email list.
You can reach subscribers of your email list whenever you want. You can build relationships with customers through email.
Email has been an important marketing channel for various sizes of businesses in the past years.
I expect it to play a more important role in digital marketing in the coming years.
What You Should Know About Mobile Email Marketing
The growth of mobile devices changed many things in the past ten years. Email marketing wasn’t an exemption.
Mobile email marketing is now a big part of email marketing itself.
To succeed in email marketing, you need to understand mobile email marketing.
Most emails are opened on mobile devices.
According to a study published on Media Post, 55% of emails are opened on mobile. This study analyzed 27 billion email opens.
Another study published on Marketing Land reveals that 68% of emails are opened on mobile devices. Desktop saw just 32% email opens.
Gmail announced that it has 1 billion monthly active users in 2016. Seventy-five percent of those users access their email accounts on mobile devices.
If you’re targeting a younger demographic, you need to ensure that your emails are optimized for mobile devices.
Your email messages should look extremely good to mobile users.
Images shouldn’t be too big. Your email should appear attractive.
Conclusion
So, is email marketing dead?
No.
Email marketing isn’t dead, and it’s not dying anytime soon. If you’re waiting for email to die, you should be prepared to wait for a long time or forever.
The goal of this article is to show you why email marketing remains a powerful marketing strategy you should be using right now.
Are you collecting emails of your site’s visitors?
You should start now if you haven’t been doing that.
You need a powerful popup tool like GrowthFunnel to help you collect lots of emails on your site.
What are you waiting for?
