Email marketing may sound very outdated. Especially when compared to ads and marketing done on social media platforms and others, but it actually isn’t. Email marketing, put in simplest terms, is the process of sending promotional emails and newsletters to a selected number of readers (however big or small the number may be).
In Europe, North America, and Asia-Pacific (APAC), email marketing is the most widely used technology for customer engagement.
Reasons Why You Should Be Doing Email Marketing
Here, I give you some of the reasons why you should be doing email marketing in 2022:
1. Access to the Largest Audience
Email marketing is the oldest means of communication since the introduction of the internet and has the largest number of users. You can pick up any social media platform and note that the number of Email users exceeds the platform’s user database. This gives you the largest audience possible in the world. According to Statista, the number of email users worldwide is forecast at 4.2 billion in 2022. This figure is set to grow to 4.6 billion in 2025, making up more than half of the expected world population.
2. Availability of Management Tools
The key is to be relevant to the readers. You have tools to manage your audience, which can be a mix of people with different interests and you can cater to the different types by keeping different mailing lists for each type and providing them with the content that is most relevant to them. The preciseness of marketing is much higher in Email marketing than on any other social media platforms.
Personalization increases the scope of engagement of an email. As researched by Yes Lifecycle Marketing in 2019, the average email open rate is 20.81%. Although, emails with personalized subject lines generate 50% higher open rates.
3. Low Investments
The cost of marketing is something that cannot be avoided if you are planning on building your own brand or promoting an existing one. The only other free substitute that you have is social media and they also have algorithms to push paid content to more users. So, your post ends up reaching only a small percentage of the users of the platform. Email marketing will provide you with tools that will charge you very less, if not nothing, to let you manage your different mailing lists and keep a track of everything. Most of them are free or at least have a trial version that allows you to go about your business easily.
To give you an idea, according to DMA, 2019, for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
4. Better Engagement Ratio
Marketing your business using email is based on the consent of your audience. Unlike pushing your content to an audience, without having an idea of their interests, email marketing gives the power in the hands of the audience, allowing them to choose the content they want to receive. This highly affects the engagement ratio of your content and you just receive better reaction from your audience, most likely because they have chosen to receive emails from you rather than your content being an uninvited guest on their social media feeds homepage.
The result of it all is that emails are 40% better at converting (in comparison to Facebook and Twitter) and 49% of consumers would like to receive promotional emails from their favorite brands directly in their inbox. This also builds brand loyalty.
5. Direct Access to Your Audience
Direct access to your audience is something that you just do not get elsewhere. The very model of Email marketing allows your content to reach your audience more effectively by delivering it directly to an individual’s inbox as compared to the model of the social media platforms that is basically a digital version of putting your post out there for passersby to see as they are strolling.
For perspective, if you have email subscribers, Facebook fans and followers on Twitter which are each 2000 in number, based on the statistics:
435 people will open your email, 120 Facebook fans will see your message and 40 Twitter followers will see your message.
6. Ease of Scalability
Scalability of Email marketing campaigns is a breeze. You can cater to a huge audience without compromising on quality or putting a strain on your resources. The size of the audience hardly makes a difference here. It wouldn’t really change the way you manage things if you have 1000 subscribers as compared to 200. The tools available for management of different mailing lists make it very easy to have everything in one place. The scope of growth dramatically increases when you have the tools available for your growth.
7. Reliability of the Medium
It is safe to say that the use of Emails is not going away anytime soon; which cannot be called true for other means of marketing like social media platforms where the trends change, causing well established and popular platforms to shut down and be forgotten over time.
Platforms like Orkut and Hi5 were most popular in older times and yet today’s generation would not even have heard of it. The shutting down of these platforms will lead to loss of leads, however, you own your Email list which can never be taken away. You are the owner of all that data. The scope of use of this data cannot be undermined. It can be used in the planning of success of future campaigns too.
8. Better Returns
Quality of audience is something that is very important to a business. It is better to have an audience of 20 out of which 18 would engage with your content or find it useful rather than having an audience of 100 who wouldn’t find your content relevant to them at all. Emails are used as the standard means of communication by employers, companies and banks and are one of the very few apps or tools that are used by people even during their work hours. This gives your content the highest accessibility rate to your audience as compared to any other means of marketing.
9. Interactivity within Wmails
There was a time when an email used to be a blank page with black words typed in them. It has evolved over time, such that today’s emails not only have pictures, videos, and gifs embedded in them but also allow the users to interact with them directly. These interactive emails are highly engaging as users can interact with different elements like forms, shopping carts, or calendars within their emails. The ability to have your audience answer a simple question or to have them take a survey all without having to leave their inbox dramatically increases engagement and email conversions.
These are only a few of the very important arguments in favor of email marketing over other means of marketing. Use of emails is huge, even in the B2B world, and is used as the main means of communication for most businesses if not all. Creating a strong email marketing strategy will help you reach and connect with your target audience in a more personalized way and increase sales at an affordable cost. Just as other platforms and media have changed, email marketing tools give your business the ability to reach customers easier than ever.
About the Author
Aquibur Rahman is the CEO of Mailmodo, an email marketing solution that enables users to send app-like interactive emails. He has marketing experience in inbound and outbound strategies, SEO, growth, CRO, and marketing automation. He has helped many B2C and B2B brands, including early-stage tech startups to fast-track growth using agile and data-driven marketing processes. When Google released AMP emails, Aquib saw great potential in it for reinventing email marketing. This led him to start Mailmodo to help businesses get better ROI from email marketing.
