What is Email Marketing? 7 Reasons to Use Email

Today’s marketers need to do more with less. They needs to connect with their audience in a highly personalized way, while staying on budget. Marketers that can do this—connect with their prospects and customers in a highly targeted way—will be successful in delivering ROI and revenue back to the business.

As the VentureBeat report illustrates, no marketing category has the longevity of email marketing. While some marketing trends come and go, email remains the most powerful channel available to the modern marketer.

Here are 7 reasons why:

1. Email marketing has larger reach.

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users and Twitter boasting 255 million, it’s tempting to believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the masses. These are impressive numbers, but what isn’t so frequently shared are the statistics on email usage.

The total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and projected to reach 4.9 billion by 2017, according to Radicati.

While this might seem surprising at first, think about your own online behavior: When you sign up for a website (like an online store), you have to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account. What’s more, Facebook and Twitter email to notify users of activity, like when someone is tagged in a photo.

Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who’s online has an active email address. And while Facebook and Twitter might seem pretty ubiquitous, the ongoing struggle over data breaches and privacy means plenty of people are exiting some social media channels.

So when it comes to connecting with your prospects and customers, there’s no channel with a wider reach than email.

There are 3x more email accounts than there are Facebook & Twitter accounts combined.

2. Email marketing delivers your message.

If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list, or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time.

There are two key reasons why:

First, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook limits the number of times your posts appear in the News Feed in an attempt to drive brands towards their paid advertising options.

This is a big deal when it comes to getting your messages in front of your desired audience.

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.

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

Secondly, your email subscribers have explicitly told you they want to hear from you when they signed up for your email list.

There are strict laws and regulations around SPAM laws, so if you’re emailing a prospect or customer, it’s because they gave you their permission. Now think about the ads in your Facebook News Feed – did you ask those companies to market to you?

Probably not. More than likely, you performed a Google search or visited their website. That’s decidedly different than proactively signing up from an email newsletter.

Email is proven to ensure your audience gets your message.

3. Email marketing drives conversions.

Most marketers are laser focused on driving conversions. Regardless of whether they do so in the form of leads, sales, memberships, or a metric unique to your business strategy, the ultimate goal for marketers 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), whereas the average click-through rate from a tweet 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. As discussed earlier, your email subscribers have told you they want to hear from you and this isn’t typically the case with social.

4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media, according to a survey conducted by Monetate.

What’s more, email is highly measurable. Campaign Monitor customers have real-time access to metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, forwards, social shares, and more.

Additionally, those who integrate their email marketing into Salesforce can see firsthand how their email marketing impacts business opportunities and deals.

As a marketer focused on nurturing leads and driving conversions—as most marketers are—email marketing trumps all other communication channels for business.

4. Email marketing has a higher ROI.

Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it makes sense that email is also the most effective marketing channel to drive ROI for your company. In fact, email marketing yields an average 3,800% return on investment for businesses and 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 comes down to delivering highly personalized and relevant messages. Unlike social networks where you send status updates to every follower regardless of their location, interests & purchase history, email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications.

The more data you have about your customers in an email marketing tool like Campaign Monitor—including insights pulled in from integrated systems like your CRM, customer service solution, etc.—the more targeted you can be.

Campaign Monitor customer Rip Curl utilized segmentation and dynamic content to deliver the right message to the right person. For example, they know the gender of their subscribers and where they are located geographically, so they can ensure that females in the United States receive a promotion about bathing suits during the summer months and males in Australia receive an email about wetsuits during the winter months.

This use of segmentation and dynamic content helps to ensure the content they send is relevant to every individual recipient and that relevance drives people to click-through, make purchases – and increase the ROI of their email marketing campaigns.

5. Email marketing is the preferred communication channel.

For many, social networks are a personal form of communication used to keep up to date with friends & family. When people log in to their social media accounts, they’re there to see photos and updates from people they know and care about.

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

According to MarketingSherpa, a vast majority of people want to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.

6. Email marketing is an open platform.

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

But while businesses are investing in various social media platforms, Facebook has frequently updated its algorithm to reduce the amount of followers who will see a brand’s post, unless those posts are paid advertisements.

This practice has become so prevalent that 98% of brand followers will never see the posts in their News Feeds. Twitter seems to be moving in a similar direction with the announcement it will introduce an algorithm-controlled feed as well.

The issue with channels like Facebook and Twitter is they’re owned and controlled by third parties which means marketers are at the mercy of changes the platforms make to their platform.

Meanwhile, email isn’t owned or controlled by any one particular entity. It’s an open communication platform and there are a multitude of services that provide access to send and receive email.

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

7. Email marketing will be around forever.

Remember MySpace? What?

The once-hot site was the largest social networking site 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 1,500th most popular website in the United States.

Imagine investing significant amounts of time and money to build an audience on a platform only to find it a ghost town just a year or two later. The impact on your ability to reach and engage potential customers would be catastrophic.

On the other hand, email 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.

Interestingly, the email space itself has evolved from a time where you needed a developer to build an email to today, where tools like Campaign Monitor empower the modern marketer to create and send beautiful branded emails with ease. This shift has put the power of business email into the hands of more people.

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