by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, June 21, 2017

Every now and then someone presents data that just stops you in your tracks, and today that is exactly what a list of statistics around various digital marketing channels has done for me.

The list reads like a very simple explanation of what works in email marketing, and to what extent. To take a good example, as an overall statistic, a marketer is six times more likely to get a response through an email than a social post. It must surely help that an email list belongs the brand, whereas Facebook controls how many of a brand’s followers get to see each post. This goes to show that email is always belong to you whereas you can’t quite say the same about social.

Similarly, we all know that personalisation works, but did you know that emails with a personal salutation receive an open rate of more than 18%, while those without average out around 13%? The same goes for segmented audiences. Open rates here are 14% higher than non-segmented campaigns.

And one of my favourites is the very easy tactic of retargeting those who have put something in their basket yet failed to convert. Those who receive cart abandonment emails are 2.4x as likely to come back and convert as those who don’t. And by the way, time is of the essence here. The first hour is a golden hour — leave it to later and success rates begin to trail off.

Perhaps the most telling statistic of all is that the Direct Marketing Association estimates that email’s ROI is 122%. To put that into perspective, that’s more than four times higher than social or paid search.

One of the reasons could come from a very surprising statistic from Experian, which would explain why it decided to get involved in email marketing. It claims that far from running away from blatant attempts to sell them goods through their inbox, recipients are very open to messages that are clearly pushing sales. Pure product-pushing transactional emails generate eight times as many opens as non-transactional messages, and they can generate six times more revenue.

So what have we learned here? Well, to be honest, we have all known for quite some time how powerful email can be, but it’s worth remembering that it has an ROI four time higher than social or paid search for a very simple reason. People do not mind being sold to. Maybe that’s the big takeaway from these figures. People actually respond well to a message that says “New Shoes In Now For $30” or “Early Bird Offer On Coats, From $99”.

Despite what we may think, the statistics show that people respond to attempts to sell them more products through email. Even if they leave it at the cash till, you can still more double your chances of getting them to come back and pay up through — guess what — an email, a triggered cart abandonment message to be more precise.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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