From social media to paid advertising to SEO, businesses today have a wide range of digital tools at their disposal.
However, there is one digital marketing channel that is a cut above the rest: email marketing.
Most, if not all businesses have some form of email marketing strategy in place. They use email marketing to engage with their audience, expand their customer base, and drive revenue—and it’s easy to see why.
In this post, we’ll walk you through five reasons why email marketing is popular among businesses and why it is an essential element of your overall digital marketing strategy.
1. Email marketing has impeccable ROI.
The simplest (and most obvious) reason why businesses depend on email marketing is that it just, flat out, works.
With email marketing, you receive $44 in return for every dollar you spend. That’s a 4,400% ROI that no other digital marketing channel has been able to surpass. To compare, paid advertising has an ROI of just 200%. For every dollar you spend on Google Ads, you get an average of $2 in revenue.
Regardless of your niche, taking advantage of email marketing will surely drive revenue for your business. To maximize profits, though, you have to send the right type of messages, which include welcome emails. On average, a welcome email generates 320% more revenue per email than other promotional emails.
2. Email gives you a wider reach.
Facebook has over 2.3 billion active monthly users as of 2019. Twitter, on the other hand, has 330 million users. Instagram has more than 1 billion users. LinkedIn has 610 million members.
With these usage statistics, some might assume that social media is the most widely used digital platform. This, however, is an incorrect assumption.
Email is the most widely used digital communication platform in the world right now. It has more users than Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn combined. As of 2019, there are approximately 3.9 billion email users across the globe.
Email is a cornerstone of the world wide web, and it’s safe to say that anybody who is active online also has an active email address.
By using email marketing, you can reach audiences that you might not be able to reach through other digital channels.
3. Customers prefer to communicate through email.
When it comes to communicating with brands, customers prefer email. According to MarketingSherpa, 72% of consumers want to receive promotional content through email, compared to only 17% who want to receive promotions through social media.
Furthermore, it seems that consumers—regardless of the demographic they belong to—generally prefer email over other digital communication platforms.
Data from WordStream suggests that 73% of millennials identify email as their preferred method of business communication.
According to Hubspot, 86% of business professionals preferred using email to communicate.
In a separate survey focused on Gen Z marketing, 31.8% of Gen Zers said they wanted to receive emails from brands a couple of times a week and 27.5% said they wanted to receive emails once a day. 58% of respondents also said they checked their emails multiple times a day.
Source: Campaign Monitor
For any brand, the key to successful engagement is meeting customers where they are. This is why email marketing is a must. The data makes one thing clear: If you want to connect with your customers on a regular basis, you need to use email marketing.
4. Email is measurable.
Measuring engagement and revenue from other digital channels can be challenging.
ROI from social media is so famously difficult to determine accurately that an estimated 70% of businesses don’t even bother measuring it.
The same goes for content marketing. In a report by Curata, 57% of content marketers said their top challenge was measuring the effectiveness of their content. 52% said their top challenge was measuring the ROI of their content marketing program.
What makes email marketing different is that it is easily measurable. All the email marketing platforms available right now have analytics dashboards that give you access to a wide range of metrics like open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, and of course email ROI.
As such, if you are looking for a marketing tool that makes measuring engagement and revenue a breeze, email marketing is your best bet.
5. Email is a highly stable platform.
Friendster. MySpace. Vine. The list goes on. These were some of the most popular social media platforms back in the day, but they’re now nowhere to be found.
Imagine spending a significant portion of your time and resources on campaigns on these social media platforms only for them to close down. It will be disastrous for your revenue as well as your existing customer base. While platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are booming, for now, you only have to look at historical data to see the volatile nature of social media marketing.
You don’t have to worry about these things with email marketing.
Email was first invented in 1972. And now, almost 50 years later, it is still going strong. In fact, email is poised to become an even stronger platform. As previously mentioned, there are currently 3.9 billion email users. According to Statista, this number will grow by more than 4.3 billion by 2023.
A major factor in email’s dominance and stability is that it largely runs the web.
Think about it. When you want to open any kind of online account, what is the one piece of information that you can’t avoid giving? Your email address.
All websites, from social media networks to banks to ecommerce sites like Amazon ask for your email address. You won’t be able to open any account online unless you give out your email address.
Wrap up
When you run a business, it’s important that you diversify your marketing portfolio and take advantage of every digital marketing channel available. That being said, prioritizing a channel like email marketing above others is highly advantageous for your business.
Email marketing is not only profitable and highly measurable, it also gives you a level of reach and engagement power that no other digital marketing channel can provide.
As long as you leverage email marketing in the right way, you can exponentially increase your revenue, expand your reach, and build better and stronger relationships with your customers.