Does Email Marketing Still Work?

Is Email Marketing Dead? Trends Say Otherwise!

Is email marketing dead? Whether you’re a search agency or a local business, there are compelling reasons to still include email marketing!

You’ve heard marketing professionals whisper it over the water cooler. Email marketing is dead; it’s not like it was in 1996, remember the golden days?

While these marketing professionals reminisce about the golden years, you can still take the bull by the horns and achieve marketing success with email, even in 2018.

Worrying about failed email campaigns scares many people. They fear they won’t make enough money to justify investing their time.

And worst of all, they don’t believe it’s possible to be successful. The truth is email marketing is big, even in 2018 with 89% of marketers saying email is their primary channel for lead generation.

As you know, lead generation equals profit and creating a killer email marketing campaign should be top of your priorities for 2018.

This article will guide you through the compelling reasons why you should be including an email campaign in your marketing.

First, Understanding Why Email Lists Are King

We send 74 trillion emails every year. No not us here at Five Channels, I mean collectively as the internet.

Email marketing is a huge component of nearly every single business. Thanks to push notifications, we have access to email everywhere we go.

When it comes to marketing strategies, businesses swear by Facebook adverts, Google AdWords and plenty of other forms of strategies. However, there’s one big problem with other types of marketing.

What’s that problem? Changing variables.

With Facebook ads and Google AdWords, you have your cost per click and competition for your keywords to worry about. These variables change all the time.

With Instagram, SEO and Organic Facebook use, you have the changing algorithms to consider. What works today, might suddenly only get 10% reach tomorrow.

That’s why email lists have been a tried and tested marketing format for the last 20 years. Your email list is yours and yours alone, it’s not going anywhere and you’re not playing by anybody else’s rules.

Here Are the Top Reasons Why Email Marketing Still Works

People send and receive 269 billion emails per day, that’s a ton of opportunities for you to reach your audience and demonstrate real value.

This is one reason why email marketing is still alive and kicking, but that’s not the only reason.

1. Don’t Believe the Hype; People Still Check Emails

The first and probably most important point to cover in this list is that email is still relevant. People will have you believe that nobody reads or checks emails, but that’s far from the truth.

The average open rates of emails in a survey of 200 million emails show that across all industries the average open rate was 18.09%, terrible right?

What if I told you that the same study also found that the average mobile open rates were 61.03%? Did that just get your attention?

Creating better mobile marketing campaigns should be a big priority when considering your marketing efforts.

We know that the first thing people do is open their email at the start of the day. Make sure you’re involved and are the first thing your audience reads at the start of each day.

2. Email Amplifies Social Media

Businesses love social media. What they sometimes fail to realize though is that social media and email marketing aren’t mutually exclusive.

Creative social media ideas can be a godsend for your business. By intertwining these two amazing platforms you can achieve huge amplified results that would make even the bravest internet marketer shed a beautiful tear.

Think about that the next time you’re planning to launch a piece of content on your social media, and then send an email blast out to your loyal fan base to ask them to interact with it.

Similarly, ask your social media base to subscribe to join your email list. It’s a win-win situation that can have your leads amplifying quicker than a pair of jackrabbits in season.

3. Where Social Media Fails, Email Marketing Prevails

Social media is hot while people love you, but what about when you fall off their radar? Email helps you get right back in the mix with your customers by giving them a gentle nudge.

When customers are looking for you, social media is the best place to engage with you. However, turning your cold customers back into lukewarm customers when they were once hot is the perfect place to focus your marketing efforts.

Email doesn’t have to be exclusively linked to selling. It can be one of the most effective ways to build brand loyalty, demonstrate value and get your customers coming back for more.

4. Marketing Through Email is Cost Effective

Let’s just address the big white elephant in the room. Although other marketing efforts can be very effective, they can also be very expensive.

Any idea how much the average mail drop costs per lead? Around $51. How about a telemarketing campaign? You’re looking upwards of $190 per lead.

On the other hand, you can do email marketing for a fraction of the cost of these traditional marketing campaigns. One of the big benefits of marketing email campaigns, which are grossly underappreciated, is your ability to make simple tweaks and re-send to unopened readers.

If you send out a mail drop, let’s say 60% of the people don’t read your leaflet. You can’t then send out the same leaflet again to that 60% to see if they will open up the leaflet this time.

Email is different. Say you get 33% open rate, why not tweak your subject line, change out the first paragraph and send the same email to all of the people who didn’t open your first email.

These cost-effective strategies can boost your user reach at a fraction of the cost of traditional advertising methods.

5. The Less Obtrusive Approach is Sometimes More Effective

What is the number one frustration you have when you open your morning mail? Junk mail.

We hate it, you hate it, even your saint of a grandmother hates it, and she loves everybody. One of the best things about email marketing is it’s unobtrusive.

People expect to receive regular emails; it happens to them every day. There is an expectation when somebody signs up to your email list that they are going to receive emails from you.

That understanding makes the perception of emails a lot easier to stomach than other advertising models. Have an advert pop up on someone’s Facebook feed, you’re distracting them from their Facebook prying pleasure.

Have an advertisement pop up on a website while somebody’s browsing for the perfect recipe for tomorrow night’s dinner, it’s frustrating.

With email marketing, the general feeling is one of a whole lot less intrusion, which is great for amplifying your brand.

6. Email Allows You to be Personable and Grow Your Brand Recognition

One of the great things about email marketing is you can write your emails direct to your audience. You don’t have to pretend to address every single different person that is reading your website or article.

You can make the content personal to the reader. Many email marketing tools even add in personalization options to include messages or names in emails to make each email stand out.

What email is really powerful for though, is building your brand recognition. Instead of trying to force products down your customer’s throat every chance you get, industry experts say the most effective email campaigns include a balance.

You can decide what percentage of value-driven emails to sales emails works best for your audience. Generally, it’s worth aiming for 80% value to 20% sales.

This is incredible for brand recognition because every time you provide value to your audience, they associate your business and your brand with value. If you send out eight consecutive emails every couple of days which helps your customer go from starting out to achieving a large goal, they’ll feel amazing.

What’s more, they’ll associate your business with helping them achieve that success, and this helps to build trust.

7. It’s Easy to Measure How Successful Your Campaigns Are

With email marketing it’s easy to evaluate the success of your campaign as all major email service providers will give you access to metrics. These metrics such as open rates, bounce rates and click-through-rate help give you a snapshot view of how your audience is interacting with your email content.

This allows you to test a whole number of different variables for email marketing success. You can figure out different measures of success for your emails such as:

• The time you send your emails
• The subject lines you pick for your emails
• How long the emails are
• How you format your emails
• How many links you include

There are a whole host of different variables to how successful your campaign can be. You can even use these analytics tools to understand better why people are unsubscribing and allows you to test the market for your business.

8. Email Marketing is Super Targeted

Most websites will give you the opportunity to sign up for a newsletter. However, many sites now are taking email opt-ins one step further and are becoming super targeted.

What does this mean? Websites are using additional controls inside their email service providers and on their websites to help break down their email lists into segments and to understand their audience better.

You can do this by asking a question in your welcome email and adding tags to your email contacts through your email provider.

You can also do this in your initial email opt-in, asking customers when they sign up to tell you what interests them and what they want to hear about, giving them a variety of options.

This super targeting helps you to niche down your customer base and help funnel your email customers into certain products, features and value-driven email sequences that will help them to become super fans of your brand and eventually long-term customers.

For example, if you have a business about marketing, your opt-in might ask if customers are specifically interested in email marketing, Facebook ads or Google AdWords.

The email sequence you can then send them in can help them maximize the value they receive out of their chosen option while reminding them they can also access the other information as well once they’ve finished each sequence.

This super-targeted marketing allows you to provide focused value to your user that helps them with their specific need and allows you to market products to them that are highly relevant.

9. You Can Generate Revenue with Just a Few Clicks

When you have an email list, you can generate revenue at a simple click of a button. If you have hundreds of thousands of people on your email lists, if you are behind on your end of quarter figures, you can give your business a big push.

A promotional email to your subscribers offering a certain percentage off products to buy can bring you a much-needed surge in revenue. While you can do similar things to this on social media, it never carries quite the same weight as email marketing.

The trick here is to make sure you have nurtured and nourished your email list relationship and provided immense value. By doing this, you won’t upset your readers when you try to help them out by offering them a discount or a product.

10. Don’t Forget Security & Ease of Use

One of the final points that works in email’s favor is security and ease of use. Where people used to have massive filing cabinets stored with bank records, receipts, and the credit card bills you can now have a virtual cabinet to keep it all safe.

The fact that people can easily store receipts and important information about your business in their emails on their phone is a powerful way to offer promotions, engage effectively with your audience and most importantly provide huge value.

Trade in your filing cabinet keys for a whole host of cloud storage instead.

Well, What Are You Waiting For? Email Marketing Is Still Alive

Now that you understand the ten reasons why email marketing is here to stay, it’s time to kick your campaign into gear. Applying yourself to a successful marketing campaign can be as difficult or as easy as you want to make it.

For the latter option and the easy route, check out our other blog posts on everything digital marketing.