Today’s marketers need to do more with less. They need to connect with their audience in a highly personalised way, while staying on budget. While some marketing trends come and go, email still remains one of the best content marketing strategies to the modern marketer with the highest return on investment. Here's why...

1. Email has larger reach

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users and Twitter boasting 255 million, it’s tempting to believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the masses. These are impressive numbers, but the statistics on email usage is even more impressive. The total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2018, and projected to reach 4.2 billion by 2022, according to research.

While this might seem surprising at first, think about your own online behaviour: When you sign up for a website (like an online store), you have to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account. What’s more, Facebook and Twitter use email to notify users of activity like when someone is tagged in a photo. For business, you likely use a different email account to your own personal account that is used for social media.

Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who is online has an active email address. So when it comes to connecting with your prospects and customers, there’s no channel with a wider reach than email.

2. Email delivers your message. Here are two key reasons why:

1. 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook uses an algorithm to limits the number of times your posts appear in the News Feed in an attempt to drive brands towards their paid advertising options.

This means your message is 45 times more likely to be seen using email than Facebook.

2. Your email subscribers have explicitly told you they want to hear from you when they signed up for your email list. Now think about the ads in your Facebook News Feed – did you ask those companies to market to you?  More than likely, you performed a Google search or visited their website. That’s decidedly different than proactively signing up from an email newsletter. This means your subscribers are more likely to be interested in your content and thus more likely to buy from you. 

3. Email drives conversions

Most marketers are laser focused on driving conversions. And when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email.

In fact, the average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3.71% (of total recipients), whereas the average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%.

This means you are 6x more likely to get someone to click-through to your website via email than you are from Twitter. As discussed earlier, your email subscribers have told you they want to hear from you – and this isn’t typically the case with social. 4.24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media, according to a survey conducted.

4. Email has a higher ROI (return on investment)

Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it would make sense that email is also the most effective marketing channel to drive ROI. Email marketing yields an average 4,400% return on investment for businesses and for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.

It’s clear from these statistics that email is cost-effective channel for marketers, but why does it outperform other channels so significantly when it comes to ROI?

It comes down to delivering highly personalized and relevant messages. Unlike social networks where you send status updates to every follower regardless of their location, interests & purchase history, email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications.

5. Email is the preferred communication channel

For many, social networks are a very personal form of communication used to keep up to date with friends & family. When people log in to their social media accounts, they are there to see photos and updates from people they know and care about.

Email on the contrary, is a much more professional medium and people expect to receive information about products and services through that channel. In fact, studies show 72% people prefer and expect to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.

6. Email is an open platform

Over the past few years, many brands have invested millions of dollars into buying large social followings in order to be able to communicate and engage with an audience.

But while businesses are investing in various social media platforms, Facebook has frequently updated its algorithm to reduce the amount of followers who will see a brand’s post, unless those posts are paid advertisements. This has become so prevalent that 98% of brand followers will never see the posts in their News Feed. Twitter seems to be moving in a similar direction with the an algorithm-controlled feed as well.

The issue with channels like Facebook and Twitter is they are owned and controlled by third parties and marketers are at the mercy of changes they make to their platform. Email, on the other hand, isn’t owned or controlled by any one particular entity. It’s an open communication platform and there are a multitude of services that provide access to send and receive email.

7. Email will be around forever

Imagine if you’d invested significant amounts of time and money building an audience on a platform, only to find it a ghost town just a year or two later. The impact on your ability to reach and engage potential customers would be catastrophic. Think of platforms like MySpace and Google+, which have become obsolete.

Email on the contrary has a long history of stability. The first promotional email campaign was sent in 1978 to a total of 400 people, and email has been growing consistently since. Building your email list, unlike building a social media following, is a stable long-term investment that will pay off for many years to come.

We can help you get started! Contact us now and let's talk about how we can make your email marketing campaigns a huge success.