Email marketing - Old AND gold
In digital marketing, just as in life, it is very easy to get hooked on the latest new toys and lose track of the good old stuff that has always worked well. If you haven’t guessed it yet, we are talking about probably the oldest digital marketing tool - email marketing. “Oh, but that’s yesterday’s technology”, you might say. Yes, it is, and there are some solid reasons why it is still a great tool. Today, we will talk about some of the email marketing benefits that must be kept in mind.
Sheer reach: According to some estimates, there are about 4.2 billion email users in the world as of today. This means that every other person in the world is reachable by email marketing campaigns. No social media platform matches this reach. No matter what audience you are looking to target, email remains a ubiquitous medium to reach them all.
Higher visibility: You might (correctly) argue that user volume without much visibility is fruitless. This is where the next important stat comes into play. Over 99% of email users open their email inbox daily. If your email is in their inbox, it has a good chance of getting noticed.
Better engagement: Building on the previous fact, what’s visible gets engaged with. About 18% of the emails get opened. Out of these, 21% get opened within the first hour of delivery. With users also clicking on the CTAs, email marketing enjoys a healthy click-to-open rate of 14.1%. For a strategy often thought of as “old-fashioned”, these are excellent engagement metrics and can help position your brand really well in your target customer’s mind.
Excellent ROI (Return on Investment): For every dollar spent on email marketing, the monetary value of engagement generated is 42 dollars. This leads to an ROI ratio of 4200%, which is the highest among all digital marketing strategies emphasizing the need for an email marketing strategy.Click To Tweet
Less impact of privacy regulations: With regulations around customer data collection and usage being increasingly stringent (for example, GDPR), digital marketers have to ensure that they are in compliance with these regulations. Email, however, is relatively less impacted by these regulations. Email marketing has been in compliance with regulations like the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The best practices and operating guidelines are widely known and practised.
Better perception: Generally speaking, email is preferred as a primary communication and marketing tactic not just by users, but also by B2B and B2C clients.
As you can see, email marketing might be old, but it is still very much gold. If you are ignoring it while creating your digital marketing strategy, you are doing so at your own risk.
Integrating email marketing at an early stage in your strategy would be a wise and effective thing to do.