Social media is trending in the marketing world.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other popular platforms have quickly become a new frontier of sorts for digital marketing experts. The promise? Plenty of spacious, fertile ground for planting the seeds of brand identity through likes, hashtags and retweets.
But what about email marketing? Not as sexy, to say the least. Still, though by no means as flashy as more new-age marketing methods, email isn’t likely to go anywhere anytime soon.
Truth be told, email marketing never really ever went anywhere, nor threatened to, for that matter. In fact, it’s managed to trend upwards across multiple generations, and millennials are leading the charge.
According to Epsilon, 43 percent of millennials have opened and read marketing-driven emails more often in the past six months than the rest of their older counterparts—all other consumers came in at around 32 percent.
Nobody Likes an Overloaded Inbox
At times, email can feel like the bane of our collective existence—196 billion emails were sent world-wide every day in 2014, 55 percent of which were business related.
That’s a ton of emails, and research has shown that number has climbed at a steady rate, despite the adoption of newer social media messaging systems. Inundated on a daily basis, despising email altogether would be completely understandable.
But think about it—we don’t hate email; we only hate the ones we don’t want to read. It’s in this ever-present space that email marketing truly shines.
Push Benefits—Not Spam
Despite the barrage of junk in our inboxes, we almost universally appreciate the benefits of email marketing material. Need some convincing? Try a few of the following on for size:
- 95 percent of people who opt into brand emails find them either somewhat or very useful.
- 72 percent of people prefer companies reaching them through email than any other medium.
- 70 percent of people say they regularly, if not always open emails from preferred brands.
These figures are a testament to how email marketing has grown into both a consumer- and information-driven platform. Campaigns that aim to entertain, inform and engage consumers have taken the email marketing niche by storm.
As a result, brands are experiencing higher, more predictable ROIs.
Digital Marketing’s Leading Channel
Taking things a step further, according to Gigaom Research, marketers consistently rank email as the single most effective channel for awareness, acquisition, conversion and retention.
With plenty of quantitative information at hand, it’s easy to see why:
- Email marketing yields an average 4,300 percent ROI for businesses in the U.S.
- Email is 40 times better at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter.
- Email has a 66 percent conversion rate—higher than any other digital marketing platform.
Despite the rise of social media marketing, it’s clear to see that email marketing is not only alive and well—it’s leading the digital marketing pack.
Mobile Matters
With the rise of the smartphone came the era of mobility in marketing.
People can now be reached anytime, anywhere through their phones on social media. But accessibility doesn’t stop there—email is also included. Per ExactTarget, 91 percent of consumers check their email on their phones at least once a day.
Of that group 71.2 percent of people will delete an email immediately if it does not display correctly on a smartphone screen.
Furthermore, via Campaign Monitor, people who open an email on their mobile device are 65 percent more likely to open it again later on a secondary device.
This gives marketers a second swing at consumer interaction and retention.
Interconnectivity
One of the greatest advantages of email marketing is its ability to seamlessly combine with other digital marketing strategies. Emails can be used to make subscribers aware of marketing efforts on other platforms, while still providing valuable information not accessible through the aforementioned networks.
And since email subscribers are three times more likely to share branded content via social media than visitors from other sources, integrating social media information into marketing emails can boost efforts on other channels, as well.
So, despite what run-of-the-mill social media marketers would like you to believe, email marketing isn’t going away. It may have a bad reputation from the early days of online spam, but modern email marketing is now stronger than it’s ever been before—adjust your digital marketing blueprint, accordingly.
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