4 reasons you should take another look at email marketing
Confession: I have feelings for email marketing again.
Despite my whirlwind romances with some of the newer digital marketing tools — like Meta ads, AI chatbots, and influencer marketing — I’ve recently found myself running back into the safe and reliable arms of email marketing. In this article, I’ll explore four reasons why I think you should give email marketing a second chance too.
1. You will reach more of your audience with email
According to this article by Campaign Monitor, about 90% of emails are successfully delivered to the recipient’s inbox, whereas about 2% of your Facebook followers will see any given post in their newsfeed. This trend holds across all social platforms, as they restrict the reach of your organic content in order to push you to pay for visibility via ads.
The Campaign Monitor article also did the math on those stats.
“On Facebook, if you post an update to your 10,000 fans only about 200 of them will even have a chance of seeing it in their News Feed. Alternatively, if you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers at least 9,000 of them will receive it in their inbox.”
When you look at it that way, the ROI is a total no-brainer.
2. And you will reach them more cost-effectively
As mentioned above, if you want to reach more social followers, you’ll have to cough up the budget for paid campaigns to amplify your message above the 2% rate of organic visibility. For each campaign, you incur the costs to promote it across various channels, and that cost can vary widely, especially for competitive industries with high-demand keywords.
Although you pay a fee for services like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, it’s a reliable monthly cost that is usually lower than the money you’ll be spending with Meta and Google, especially if you’re communicating frequently with your users.
Does this mean you shouldn’t do paid campaigns? Not at all. They’re incredible tools for reaching new audiences. And once you’ve reached them, you should work hard to quickly convert them into email subscribers.
3. You can send more personal and meaningful messages
A study by Experian found that personalized emails have a 29% higher open rate and a 41% higher click-through rate than non-personalized emails. It makes sense: The recipient feels like the message was meant for them and they are more likely to take action versus a generic message that feels like it was broadcast to thousands of others. Adding someone’s name or recommending products based on past purchases is easy to do with email marketing tools, and a worthy effort to make overall.
Segmentation entails dividing your audience into distinct groups based on specific characteristics, preferences, or behaviours. It allows you to personalize content at a broader level, such as geography, engagement levels or interest categories. As a result, open rates increase, click-through rates improve, and unsubscribe rates decline, as your emails become more valuable and less intrusive.
4. You can reach your audience even when you aren’t creating new campaigns
Taking the time to set up email automation is a game-changer. An example of this is the welcome series. When someone subscribes, this triggers a series of emails that help to onboard them by introducing them to your brand, providing an offer or other valuable content out of the gate, and encouraging them to connect with you on social. Once you’ve set up the welcome series it runs every time a new person joins your list, creating a solid relationship from the beginning.
Other examples of email marketing automation are an abandoned cart series (where you remind and entice the customer to complete their purchase), an event registration series (providing confirmation, agenda and logistical information), and a re-engagement series for inactive subscribers (where you check in to see if they still want to hear from you and/or change their preferences).
The beauty of automation is that you set them up once and then reap the benefits each time they are triggered, without any further effort on your part.
Give email another chance
As digital marketing evolves, email has quietly been adapting along with it, allowing marketers to employ automation, artificial intelligence, and personalization to reach more of their audience in a cost-effective way. Its staying power lies in its ability to foster direct and meaningful communication in a noisy sea of mass messages, resulting in some of the best conversion rates around.
Or in other words: I’m sorry, Email Marketing. I’ll never take you for granted again.
