7 ways to convince your clients they should be doing email marketing

When we talk to our agency partners, we frequently hear how challenging it can be to convince clients they should be doing email marketing.

It’s kind of understandable too, as newer channels like social media tend to get more attention.

So how can you convince your clients they should be investing in email?

To help you out, we’ve compiled a list of research-backed reasons all businesses should be using email. The idea is that you can use the arguments, statistics and research to make a compelling case to your clients that they should be working with you to send email campaigns.

7 reasons every business should use email

Here are the top 7 reasons all businesses should use email:

1. Email has a larger reach

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users per month and Twitter claiming to have 255 million, you could excuse people for thinking social is the best way to reach the masses.

And while these are impressive numbers, what you don’t see so frequently touted are the statistics on email usage. According to Radicati, the total number of worldwide email accounts was 4.3 billion in 2015.

To put that in perspective for you, there are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined.

If this seems unbelievable to you or your clients, take a second to think about your own online behavior. If you’ve ever signed up for a website (like an online store for example), you would have had to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account.

Having an email address is almost a prerequisite for using the web today, and anybody who is online has an active email address. So when it comes to reaching the masses with your marketing messages, there’s no medium with a wider reach than email.

2. Email gets your message delivered

According to Forrester Research, if businesses have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for email every time.

Why?

Because 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts on their News Feed.

This is because Facebook purposely limits the number of times a brand’s posts appear on the Newsfeed in an attempt to drive businesses towards their paid advertising options.

This is a big deal when it comes to getting your message across.

For instance, if you post an update to your 10,000 fans on facebook it’s likely only 200 of them will see it on their Newsfeed. Alternatively, if you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers approximately 9,000 of them would receive it in their inbox.

This means your message is 45 times more likely to be seen using email than Facebook.

So when it comes to getting marketing messages heard by an audience, email marketing is by far the superior channel.

3. Email has higher conversion rates

Most businesses are focused on driving conversions. Regardless of whether this is in the form of leads, sales, memberships, etc. the ultimate goal of almost all marketing efforts is to turn potential customers into paying customers.

And when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email.

In fact, the average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients). Compare this to the average click-through rate from a tweet, which is around 0.5%.

This means you are 6x more likely to get someone to click-through to your website via email than you are from Twitter.

Once they arrive, visitors from email have a higher likelihood of converting into paying customers as well.

According to a survey conducted by Monetate, 4.24% of visitors from email buy something on your site compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media.

4. Email has a higher Return on Investment (ROI)

According to a recent report by VentureBeat, email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel available today, beating out social media, paid search, TV and radio among others.

In fact, studies show that for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $38.

It’s clear from these statistics that email is a cost-effective channel for marketers, but why does it outperform other channels so significantly when it comes to ROI?

It’s because – unlike social networks where you send status updates to every follower regardless of their location, interests & purchase history – email is targeted and personal.

Businesses can use tools like segmentation and dynamic content to deliver the right email to the right person at the right time. For example, Campaign Monitor customer Rip Curl knows the gender and location of their subscribers and uses that information to ensure that females in the United States receive campaigns about bikinis during the summer months, while males in Australia receive emails about wetsuits during the winter months.

This extreme personalization of campaigns helps ensure that every email is relevant to the individual recipient receiving it, and that relevance drives people to click-through, make a purchase, and ensure email delivers the highest ROI of any marketing channel.

5. Email is how your audience want you to communicate with them

For many, social networks are a very personal form of communication used to keep up to date with friends & family.

When people log into their social media accounts, they come with expectations of seeing photos and updates from people they know and care about, not marketing messages from companies they don’t know.

Email on the contrary, is a much more professional medium and people expect to receive information about products and services through that channel.

As a result, people are much more open to marketing messages in the inbox. In fact, studies show 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.

6. Email is an open platform that isn’t controlled by any one party

Over the past few years, many brands have invested millions of dollars into building large Facebook followings in order to be able to communicate and engage with an audience.

But while they were doing that, Facebook has been consistently updating its algorithm to reduce the amount of reach a brand’s posts have on the platform. To the point where less than 2% of a brand’s followers will see their posts on the Newsfeed.

Similarly, Twitter seems to be moving in a similar direction with the announcement it will be introducing an algorithm-controlled feed as well.

That’s the problem with channels like Facebook and Twitter, they are owned and controlled by 3rd parties and you are at the mercy of changes they make to their platform.

Email, on the other hand, isn’t owned or controlled by any one particular entity. It’s an open communication platform and everybody from Microsoft to Google to Yahoo all provide ways to access & receive email.

The diverse array of companies involved in email ensures that no one party can make changes that are going to have a widespread effect, and unlike Facebook or Twitter, if you invest the time and money into building a great email list it’s an asset you will own and be able to leverage forever, without the threat of someone limiting its effectiveness.

7. Email will be around forever

Remember MySpace?

The once-hot site was the largest social network in the world between 2005 and 2008, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States.

Yet where is MySpace now? All those users eventually moved on to other social networks, and the site is now the 1500th most popular website in the United States. A massive decline from its once pinnacle as the most popular site on the web.

Imagine if you’d invested significant amounts of time and money building an audience on those platforms, only to find it a ghost town just a year or two later. The impact to your ability to reach and engage potential customers would be huge.

Email on the contrary has a long history of stability. The first promotional email campaign was sent in 1978 to a total of 400 people, and email has been growing consistently since.

While it’s definitely evolved as a medium, it’s never lost users like many social networks have. In fact, in 2013 the estimated number of email accounts was 3.9 billion and it’s expected to continue to grow, with the number of email accounts expected to reach 4.9 billion by 2017.

Building an email list, unlike building a social media following, is a stable long-term investment that will pay off for many years to come.

In Conclusion

Although it might not be the most talked about marketing channel these days, email has time and time again been proven to be the most effective.

As an experienced agency you likely already know this, but often times it can be hard to get your clients to see the light.

So next time you’re speaking with your clients about ways to grow their business, use some of these arguments & statistics to make your case and convince them to start working with you to grow their business using email.