10 Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Works
Email marketing still works! It remains one of the most powerful tools for businesses looking to build strong customer relationships, drive sales, and enhance brand awareness. Unlike traditional advertising methods, which can be costly and unpredictable, email marketing offers an affordable and measurable way to connect with audiences in a meaningful way.
With the ability to personalise messages, segment audiences, and automate campaigns, businesses can deliver relevant content directly to customers’ inboxes, increasing engagement and conversion rates. You can also use this strategy to drive traffic to their website, promote new blog posts, or complement social media efforts.
But does it still hold the same value in an era dominated by social media, AI-driven ads, and instant messaging?
The answer is a resounding yes. Email marketing consistently delivers one of the highest returns on investment (ROI) in digital marketing. According to Litmus, email generates an average ROI of $42 for every $1 spent. Research from HubSpot also shows that 78% of marketers who use email marketing report an increase in engagement within just 12 months.
So, despite the rise of new marketing channels, email continues to be a critical pillar for businesses of all sizes. Let’s explore 10 data-backed reasons why email marketing remains a dominant force in 2024.
1. Personalisation and Segmentation
Email marketing gives you the luxury of quickly personalising campaigns, so you can be more specific in targeting your intended audience. If your product or service is intended for a certain demographic, you can easily stylise your emails to reflect their interests. This allows you to target niche markets and make instant changes to make the campaign more effective.
In comparison to a direct mail campaign, this can be done quickly and more efficiently – avoiding printing restrictions and incurring costs. Personalisation helps businesses put their offerings in front of the right audience, thereby increasing their chances of getting engagement from the audience.
How Personalisation Works:
- Addressing recipients by name
- Customising product recommendations based on browsing behaviour
- Sending emails at optimal times based on past engagement
For example, an e-commerce store can send exclusive discounts to high-value customers or target cart abandoners with reminder emails. Research by Campaign Monitor found that segmented email campaigns generate a 760% increase in revenue compared to non-segmented campaigns. The more relevant your emails, the higher the chances of conversion.
Here’s an example of email personalisation:
2. Measurable Results & Analytics
Unlike traditional marketing methods, email marketing offers comprehensive tracking to measure success. Depending on how inclusive your analysis tool is, you can profile your ideal customer by finding out a range of demographic information to aid your future campaigns. Marketers can monitor:
- Open rates – Who is opening your emails?
- Click-through rates (CTR) – Which links are being clicked?
- Conversion rates – How many recipients took the desired action?
- Unsubscribe rates – Are people opting out? Respecting their preferences saves you from making it to the spam list, where you’ll most likely be penalised.
Tools like Google Analytics, Mailchimp, and HubSpot provide detailed insights, allowing businesses to refine their email strategies for better engagement and ROI.
3. Still the Most “Businessy” Medium
Although there are upward trends in the way that companies communicate online to provide customer service, when it comes to building business relationships,, email remains the go-to medium for professional communication. Not only do emails suggest a more serious, grown-up conversation, business professionals generally do not go on to social media websites for private, business-related discussions. According to Adobe, employees spend an average of 3.1 hours per day checking work emails. This makes email marketing the perfect channel to reach B2B and high-intent audiences in a professional setting.
4. Volume of Users
Email tops the list of active accounts and users. It has nearly three times the amount of users than Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s an enormous 2.9 billion users! In other words, both Facebook and Twitter make up just 0.2% of the number of emails sent every day (not including spam). Many modern marketers will state that they’ve “tried it, but it didn’t work”. In that case, you might be missing something in your campaigns, or there’s something you’re not getting right. Ideally, email marketing ought to be an integral component in your marketing and sales approach. For instance, if you are targeting an older audience, a lot of your prospects may not have any social media account.
The closer you can get to a written letter, the better!
5. People See it as a Transactional Medium
Many people expect to receive offers by email. They are more likely to be primed and in a buying frame of mind when they view your message. When compared to other forms of marketing, such as social media marketing, messages get less attention as customers are in a frivolous, non-business or transactional state of mind. People are predominantly on social media to chat with their friends, share photos, and catch up with the celebrities they follow. This is far from looking for anything to buy. In fact, when they want to buy, they go to places like Google or their favourite online stores.
This does not mean that social media marketing is not effective at all. Rather, when you compare selling on social media to marketing via email, you are more likely to get more qualified leads and even faster. Social media marketing is still a great way to build brand awareness and get your messages out there.
6. A/B Testing for Optimisation
Email marketing allows you to quickly identify sections of your mailing lists that aren’t engaging or responding to your campaigns. This means that you can tweak and revise your messaging to better communicate with your ideal customers. There are several techniques that you can use to test your email marketing. Whether you choose to split tests or try out more involved methods, testing will allow you to tailor your emails to address each customer’s interests and needs.
A/B testing allows marketers to experiment with:
- Subject lines (e.g., “Flash Sale” vs. “Exclusive Offer Just for You”) – You should avoid spammy subject lines like ‘free’, ‘earn money’, ‘act now’ and ‘amazing deal’.
- Call-to-action (e.g., “Shop Now” vs. “Claim Your Discount”)
- Design elements (e.g., text-heavy vs. image-rich emails)
Examples of email testing tools that you can use include:
- Litmus
- Mailtrap
- EmailReach
- Inbox Inspector, and
- Email on Acid
These tools can help you test how your email design and content are impacting deliverability and engagement. With the insights you gain from this, you can make necessary adjustments to improve your results. But in some cases, your email service provider (ESP) may provide you with this service.
7. Reduced Expenses
Direct marketing can incur lots of costs by way of designing, printing, and posting expenses. Telemarketing can involve a lengthy process of prospecting for customers, qualifying them, and closing the sale. This can put significant pressure on sales teams and absorb a lot of their time. On average, email marketing is likely to cost less than 10% of a direct marketing campaign, whilst reaching a considerably larger audience. Email marketing can cost as much or as little as you want and has very little up-front costs.
In essence, you get to decide how much you spend on email marketing. Spending less never means compromise. Email marketing allows you to create campaigns quickly and efficiently, without driving up expenses. Litmus – an enterprise email marketing service provider – maintains that email marketing generates $42 for every $1 spent. This is an eye-popping 4,200% ROI, making it one of the most effective digital marketing strategies available.
8. Less Intrusive
Almost everyone at some stage has been disturbed by a cold call or skipped through television adverts to get back to their programme. This is because we are frequently interrupted in prior activity with messages that we often do not solicit. Email marketing works because customers actively open your email and are engaged with your message when they see it. If you’ve done an excellent job designing your email, customers will look forward to seeing what you have to say! Keep in mind that the content and aesthetics of the email play an important part in building engagement.
9. Targeted
Traditional forms of advertising are based on the notion that if you reach out to thousands of people, you are likely to receive a few responses. Unfortunately, most of these people may find your message irrelevant, and worse, intrusive of their privacy. On the other hand, email marketing works more efficiently because you are sending out targeted messages to the right audience.
This can be based on their preferences, location, local market conditions, and other influences. Email marketing allows you to build lists, which you can also segment by age, gender, marital status, income, interests, etc. This eliminates a lot of the uncertainty that makes other forms of marketing ineffective.
10. Interactivity
Emails are an amazing marketing tool. Though there are several social media platforms that offer advanced interactivity, email marketing is perhaps the best example of how interactive marketing can take your messages to a different level entirely. Your audience can:
forward your emails to friends
- Click on your links to view more information
- Add products and services to their shopping carts
- Access their personal accounts, update subscriptions
- Visit and read your blogs
- Post to your Facebook page and follow you on Twitter
[easy-tweet tweet=”You’ can’t click on a Newspaper advert – 10 reasons #email #marketing still works!”]
And they can do all these right from one email you send out.
Do you have a business that could benefit from optimised email marketing campaigns? Now is the time to explore the benefits of email marketing and improve your business results. Now that you know why email marketing is effective, you too can join the trend, and see for yourself.
But guess what? You don’t even need to stress to implement email marketing. With our email marketing automation tool, you can enjoy the benefits of email campaigns without needing to write and send out emails manually. Give us a call today at Munro Marketing to ask for a free trial. We are a Marketing Automation Agency that specialises in Lead Generation, helping you make the most out of your marketing efforts.
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