Why Email Marketing Remains to Be an Important Piece of the Marketing Puzzle
With the rise of new platforms to engage consumers, email marketing continues to flourish as a marketing channel. Email is a core channel that has evolved alongside changing customer expectations. It remains to be an important piece of the marketing puzzle!
With the rise of new platforms to engage consumers, email marketing continues to flourish as a marketing channel. A recent report highlighted 28 per cent YOY growth for email and it is an important piece of the marketing mix and remains to be important for brands to reach and engage customers.
Email is a core channel that has evolved alongside changing customer expectations. It underpins newer platforms and an email address is crucial to create a login for most social media accounts. Still not convinced? Here are the main reasons why email marketing should sit at the centre of your marketing activity.
- Reach: Facebook has 1.55 billion monthly active users, Instagram has 400 million, yet there are over 4 billion active email addresses in the world providing brands with a significant pool of current and future customers to engage with. You can’t deny the reach of email!
- Personalisation: Email has the power to send one piece of content to thousands of recipients and remain personal, based on your recipients’ previous behaviour. Email is also the glue when it comes to automation across all marketing channels and complements other platforms. For instance, if brands are running promotions via social media, they can retarget through email marketing. Email brings platforms together to promote a single customer view and delivers the connected experience consumers desire and increasingly expect.
- ROI: Email marketing has the highest ROI of all digital channels, according to the DMA. Email is also 300 per cent more effective than social media at converting leads. But as brands reflect on the proportion of their marketing budget that’s spent on email, it’s usually less than 10 per cent, especially in comparison to the big budget spenders of SEO and PPC. It’s time for brands to realise the importance of email in delivering ROI. Email underpins the majority of marketing platforms and provides a unique customer identifier to deliver cross-channel experiences.
- Life span: An email has a long life span and sits inside your subscriber’s inbox waiting for acknowledgement – it’s dynamic and tends to require action. You have to read it or delete it, especially if you want your mail notifications number to be zero! This is different to other forms of marketing which often depend on the consumer being there at the right time – for instance, on average, a tweet has a life span of less than three seconds.
- Promotional opportunities: Email provides a number of opportunities to engage consumers with promotions. Email marketing can include multiple promotions and calls to action and allows brands to tailor content based on specific objectives. Promotions can be personalised and dynamic and target consumers more effectively than other channels. Also, the good news is 91 per cent of consumers are happy to receive promotional emails, according to MarketingSherpa.
An important factor to note is that although email marketing might deliver more ROI and reach than platforms such as social media, they are at different parts of the sales funnel and complement each other. Without an email address, consumers can’t access their social media accounts! Brands need to consider all the pieces of the marketing puzzle when looking at their strategy and email remains to be an important part. When other platforms increase in popularity, email marketing should not be pushed aside. It’s a constant channel that must sit at the heart of marketer’s communications with customers.