Email — The Heartbeat of Digital Marketing Strategy: 9 Reasons Why
Email is not dead! Here’s why.
In recent years we have heard experts’ predictions on why email marketing is a thing of the past. Some of them insist it is ineffective compared to other digital strategy tools. Some even claim it shows no result at all, selling yet another innovation that will supposedly change the rules of the game. However, new marketing channels appear and marketers use them with emails, not instead of them.
The purpose of this article is to prove that email is and will continue to be a powerful tool for building effective digital strategies.
1. Email is a user ID in advertising networks
Marketing tools have different goals. For example, social media ads aim to generate leads, TV ads increase brand awareness and others drive traffic to your website. However, in order to turn a lead into a customer, most brands still use email subscriptions. Here’s why:
When used as a user ID, an email functions as a key. Each user ID or key can be used to find a particular person in advertising networks.
“Email is a centralized channel. If you have a person’s email address you can use it as a user ID on any mailing platform, program, etc. Messengers need an identifier as well. So for this purpose, messengers are linked to emails.”
— Ivan Ilyin, ‘EmailSoldiers’
E.g. With an email address you can run relevant ads on Facebook and can also use Google AdWords to display ads to this specific email user.
Using an email address, you can also send personalized messages that promote your brand or product in order to attract and retain customers.
Email is a multifunctional user identifier. This makes using an email subscription advantageous, as It allows you to run any marketing activity. These activities include, but are not limited to: retargeting, content distribution, selling, cross-selling, etc.
2. Email offers one of the best ROI
Email marketing produces results that supersedes the results of most other channels. According to Litmus, average email marketing ROI is $40 for $1 spent.
Digital Marketing Community post which is based on surveys conducted among marketers, shows that email marketing gives one of the best results in terms of return on investment.
3. Email brings all marketing tools together
Any marketing solution can be promoted via email. You can invite people to participate in a new contest on social media, share a new article, or ask them to join a new group or channel. Furthermore, new marketing channels, such as social media networks don’t have to compete with email marketing. They produce better results when they work together or are used simultaneously. Team them up.
Social media and bots are not competitors to emails. They should work together. The reluctance or refusal to apply this principle could leave your business lagging behind that of competitors.
For example, your business sells nail polish solely via Instagram. Another nail polish shop sells their product on Instagram AND sends emails with new arrivals to the subscribers with a link to the Instagram account attached. By doing so, the other nail polish shop will most likely gain more customers.
Having collected a list of email addresses, you can run targeted Instagram and Facebook ads and vice versa, send emails to leads coming from social media platforms.
4. Email is a self-sustained marketing channel
Simultaneous usage of various marketing tactics is efficient. No questions about that. However, imagine you have just started a new business and there is no team. Which marketing tactic should you choose if you have insufficient resources or money to use all of them? You should choose one single online marketing tactic — choose a self-sustainable one.
Gigaom asked marketers to rank their digital tactics across the marketing funnel. The survey was based on 4 criteria:
- Awareness;
- Acquisition;
- Conversion;
- Retention.
Email marketing turned out to be a “workhorse” — an independent channel with high rates in all 4 areas.
“Email emerged as the digital-marketing workhorse, deemed effective for meeting all objectives. In fact, marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.“
— David Deal, “Workhorses and dark horses: digital tactics for customer acquisition” | Source: Gigaom Research
In particular, email is really effective for customer retention.
Here are the figures for all four criteria:
To further elucidate the efficiency of email as a self-sustaining marketing channel, let’s recall the following specific media outlets.
Firstly, Axios — a news media that uses email as a channel of distributing information. Axios has more than 15 specific issue-related newsletters that are tailored to different areas including Science and Media trends. Anyone can gain access or subscribe to any of the newsletters by simply signing up for them.
Secondly, theSkimm — a daily newsletter that supplies helpful and important news and information for female millennials. Finally, The Bell — a successful Russian news media project. The Bell uses email to keep their subscribers abreast of headline news brief and latest trends. Initially, theSkimm and The Bell existed only in the form of newsletters and email was their only channel of distributing information. They continued to thrive this way and websites only appeared much later.
5. Email has bigger audience than other channels
Email still has more users and is more versatile than current social media networks. According to Statista, by the end of 2019 there will be 3,9 billion email users. The number is still growing:
As for social media, Facebook, which is the most popular social media platform, sees 2,23 billion active users per month, according to Omnicore. Instagram and Twitter have 1 billion and 326 million users monthly, respectively.
6. Email lives a long-lasting life in your inbox
Email marketing builds a long-term relationship with a customer. Posts and tweets are just a fling, compared to it.
According to Copypress, a tweet lives for about 18 minutes, a Facebook post lasts for 90 minutes and the average Instagram’s content lifespan is 48 hours. Then they all get lost in the news feed.
Everything is different with an email. It is stored in the inbox permanently, and you can return to it at any time.
Moreover, your subscribers may receive and read your emails for years. You are able to develop and manage this ‘long-term relations’ using different scenarios, while the subscribers send their feedback giving you a leg-up on your next steps.
On social media platforms, a person sees posts because they were generated to appear on their newsfeed. The user doesn’t necessarily read them and it is not possible to find out for sure if they did. While for emails, if a person opens a mail, it means that they showed interest in it. On the other hand, if your emails always remain unopened it’s a wake-up call. It’s time to change something in your ‘relationship’ with subscribers.
7. Email has many design options
While using the email, you can add images, GIFs, change colors, fonts, columns. Do posts have such variations to choose from?
For example, a mailable microsite with navigation, menus and live content. A letter that looks like a mini-site. Currently, email is the only marketing channel that can offer such tool.
What about games?
Furthermore, Google officially launched AMP for emails this year. This means email is not longer a static content — it is a dynamic, web page-like message. You no longer need to click on a link in order to carry out an action. You’ll be able to confirm an event right from the email, fill out a questionnaire, book a table at the restaurant or respond to a comment, all without leaving your web-based email client.
Also AMP gives new opportunities for various types of businesses: musicians may add tracks to emails, online retailers may send full catalogues, restaurants may offer today’s dinner menu and available tables.
So far, Gmail, Yahoo Mail, and Outlook have announced support for AMP technology:
- AMP emails are already functional in the web version of Gmail. Mobile support is coming soon;
- Yahoo Mail has declared that they are working on AMP support and has promised to introduce the technology soon;
- Microsoft expects AMP support for Outlook to be ready by the summer of 2019;
- Mail.ru has also added support for AMP. For both the web and mobile versions.
Isn’t this a new age for email?
8. Automation with triggered emails
When a certain letter is sent to a client depending on its action (trigger) it is called trigger email. There are various triggers: subscription, new order placement, unemptied shopping carts in an online store, lack of transitions and many more.
For example, the web store visitor left items in the shopping cart but never proceeded to order them. It is the trigger email that reminds the person that there is a limited number of items left in the store, or to offer additional discount, free shipping or any other bonus.
Compared to other channels, only email marketing has such options.
There are no services to automate triggers for messengers. But there are for email.
9. People trust information sent via email
Adobe report says, email is still the most preferable communication tool in terms of solving business and work related issues.
Users also prefer to receive commercial offers from brands via email.
The diversification of communication tools has reduced the response time to an email. Social media messengers and mobile apps have become tools for daily communication with friends and relatives. As a result, no more private messages using email, and more brands’ newsletters in the inbox with the increased efficiency of the letter.
To Wrap this Up
Email has become an increasingly functional tool and its audience is rapidly growing as well. Email can bring various marketing tactics together or work as a single self-sustained marketing channel.
Email is still the center of digital marketing strategy. Therefore, the most reasonable approach to an effective digital strategy would be to use email marketing along with new various marketing tactics.
If you like what you just read, please hit the green “Recommend” button below so that more readers can stumble upon this story. Also, don’t lose us — hit “follow” to receive updates about our new materials. Show your support by “clapping”.
‘UniSender’ values your opinion.
