7 Reasons Why Email Marketing is Not Dead

With the growth of the Internet Of Things (IOT), information becomes omnipresent on the Internet. As a brand, it is vital to be present online or it becomes obsolete and easily forgotten. On average, Google processes more than 40,000 searches every second, that is 3.5 billion searches per day. It is seemingly difficult to differentiate a brand from the rest and impossible to be on top of the search list.

While starting a blog on your website helps your site to be found on search engines, email marketing serves as a medium to position yourself to an audience through customer engagement and as a sales funnel.

One of the best ways to protect yourself from being too reliant on these tech giants is to build your own e-mail list.

Email marketing works for bloggers, affiliate marketers, and brands. Bloggers use email marketing to engage with customers, non-profit organizations employ email marketing to connect with supporters and donors, while organizations make use of email to differentiate itself and as an easier way to connect to customers.

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing using email to communicate and deliver advertising messages to an audience. It’s when an organization compiles an email list to reach and inform new and existing customers on your products and services, as well as promotions.

Emails are one of the most cost-efficient marketing channels to use for broadcasting to a wide audience who have shown interest in your products and services. The importance of sending emails is to enhance the relationship with your current and previous customers to encourage customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

7 Reasons Why Email Marketing Isn’t Dead

1. Email marketing improves SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not directly associated with email marketing since search engines don’t rank individual emails. However, email marketing brings potential customers to your content, which then leads to improved SEO results.

Email marketing helps to improve bounce rates as you are able to control the quality of your visitors. Visitors that come from your email lists tend to be more engaged as they have shown interest in your brand by subscribing to your email list. The longer a visitor spends on your site, the more likely they are to convert thus leading to a higher ranking of your website.

The personal nature of emails is perfect for a call to action (CTAs). By getting your content in front of a target audience, it increases the opportunities of each piece being re-tweeted, commented on, and shared on social media platforms. This increased social visibility helps in your SEO ranking.

Emails are one of the stepping stones in order to achieve a good brand reputation. Through quality content and traffic, you are positioned as a trustworthy source of information and more users are encouraged to come back to the website thus improving your site SEO. In a HubSpot survey, it reveals that 38% opted to subscribe to email subscriptions by certain companies for its “relevance”, and one respondent mentioned that email content should be “particularly and specifically” relevant to them. Search engines are getting better and better at separating quality content from the rest, but email marketing is a method to channel high-quality visitors to your high-quality content.

2. Email marketing generates the highest Return on Investment (ROI) for marketers

For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI. This is because email marketing allows marketers to send targeted messages to their subscribers. Mainstream advertising such as print, TV, and media often advertise indiscriminately and frequently reaches consumers who have little to no interest in the product offered. Email delivers highly personalized and relevant messages, which increases the engagement thus, conversion. Contrary to social networks which send status updates to followers regardless of their location, interests, and behaviour.

Evidently, email marketing beats Facebook and Twitter in customer acquisition by 40 times! Through personalization and hyper-targeting, emails are able to deliver the right message, to the right person, at the right time as consumers are demanding brands to know who they are and providing them with relevant content. With email marketing along with segmentation, you are able to send a powerful and persuasive message to the customer.

Email marketing also has a larger reach and is best at delivering commercial or professional messages as social media is where people spend time looking at memes, pictures, inspirational quotes, and short-form updates.

Moreover, email marketing is a more efficient way of getting your customers to receive your messages as 90% of your email gets delivered to your customers’ inbox, compared to only 2% of Facebook followers who will get to see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook is encouraging companies towards their paid advertising strategies by limiting the number of times your posts appear in the News Feed. Your message is 45 times more likely to be seen on email than on Facebook. 

3. Email marketing is easily integrated with other communication channels 

Email marketing can be integrated with other communication channels to engage and acquire customers more effectively. Social media ads are effective in reaching new audiences whereas email only reaches the current email list. This is because consumers tend to share social media content than content from emails. 57% of global content sharing activities come from Facebook, 18% from Twitter and only 4% from email. With the benefit of social media, it can be employed to grow your email marketing list by promoting opt-in offers across your social media profiles.

Using paid social ads and targeting features like lookalike audiences increase the chance of reaching those who are interested to join your email list. You can also use social media to drive email marketing conversions. One of the few ways is to educate consumers about your products and services or to learn about what grabs your audience’s attention. The clear main benefit of this is the increase in engagement. Hence, social media is great for driving traffic to your website, either by paying for ads or making your content viral, where email is great for customer engagement, driving sales and increasing customer retention.

4. Email marketing has a larger reach

While Facebook has 1 billion active users and Twitter 255 million, there are 3 times more email accounts than there are Facebook and Twitter accounts combined. Anyone who is online has an email address. When anyone signs up for an account online, be it Facebook, Twitter or online stores, an email address is required. Email marketing is often reported as the second only to search marketing as the most effective marketing technique.

People still prefer email more than other platforms. In fact, based on a study from 2017, 85% of the adult internet users in the US are on email. This outperforms search engines by 15% and social media by 22%. There are also statistics that show 58% of people check their email before anything else online. Also, email reaches 85% of the people you send it to and has an open rate of 22.86%.

5. Email is the most preferred communication channel

91% of US adults like receiving promotional emails from companies they have subscribed to. A study also found that 72% of US adults prefer communications with companies through email, being the most preferred communication channel for customers. Whereas social media is only preferred by less than 20% of the respondents. Social media may be fun and glamorous, but most people do not consider a message sent to their social media profile to be as “official” as an email.

It makes intuitive sense that people logs in to social media accounts to see updates and photos of people they care about, whereas email is a go-to-channel for much more professional messages such as information about products and services.

It appears that 60% of consumers subscribed to a brand’s email list to receive commercial messages where 20% follow brands on social media to get deals. Also, 44% of users check their emails for a special deal and only 4% goes to Facebook.

6. Email drives conversions

Marketers are focused on driving sales, and email is the best channel for conversion. As the average click-through rate of an email campaign is 3%, it is 6 times more likely to reach an audience through email. A survey shows that 4.24% of visitors from email make a purchase, as compared to 2.49% from search engines and 0.59% from social media.

Brands that earn repeat businesses with customers is based on one underlying principle, trust. Email marketing is crucial for increasing sales through customer loyalty as it enhances the relationship with the brands’ previous and existing customers. In the world of marketing, to build a strong trust relationship with customers requires a “know, like, trust” factor.

For any consumer to engage in business with you, they first have to “know” you at a deeper level. Then some will come to “like” you after knowing what you do, why you do it and how you do it. Then there comes “trust”. A person is more likely to buy from you if they like you, but trust creates a customer and returning customers. Email marketing is designed to engage customers through quality content, thus it is most crucial and capable of conversion, as you build a trust relationship with your customers. A report states that 66% of online consumers make a purchase resulting from email marketing, whereas only 20% from Facebook promotions.

7. Email increases customer retention

As a blogger, it is not sufficient to only attract the audience to your website, you need to retain them as well for sustainability and to keep selling your products and services. Statistics show that once a brand loses a customer, 68% of consumers will never go back, but 80% of these lost customers claim that the companies could have done something to retain them. There are several types of email that keep customers coming back, including onboarding emails, inactivity emails, activity emails, renewal emails, cross-sells & upsells, VIP offers and surveys.

An effective customer retention strategy includes an email marketing campaign that continuously engages with its customers all along their journey with your brand. These emails will position your brand top of mind to the consumers. With an email list, you will be able to send them exclusive offers and promotions, and this will increase the chances of them buying again. Many won’t be buying from you again if you don’t remind them of new products and services offers.

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Email marketing should be integrated into any business, be it big or small, and reap a successful return on investment and conversion. If you are starting a blog, use email marketing to engage with your customers and channel them to your blog’s content. Email marketing can help turn you into a trusted advisor for your audience.

Consistent communication makes good engagement with customers and this leads the way to their heart and trust, which result in conversion when your customers trust you as an expert in the field. All you need is an email address, email marketing software platform, and ideas to communicate with your audience.

To wrap it up, we present to you a step by step checklist in order for you to get started:

1: Subscribe to an email service provider (we recommend ConvertKit or Drip)

2: Add irresistible opt-in forms to your site and give away an incentive (We recommend Thrive Leads)

3: Actively build your email list

4: Send regular content to your email list

5: Present relevant offers to your list occasionally

6: Repeat step 3 to 5 on a regular basis

The benefits and essentials of email marketing are significant. However, it must be paired with an effective email marketing strategy. Without a good strategy, your efforts on email marketing may end up costly and “hated” by your customers.

If you care about your brand reputation and are serious inefficiently monetizing your email and blog, this blog traffic ebook is here to help you on a step by step basis.

It guides you on how to create the email marketing plan, growing your email list, maximizing your open rate, email types to use, writing a great subject line and many more. Maximize your returns and start marketing with emails!