Why Email Marketing Is Still Relevant
With so many different marketing methods open to businesses, it can be tempting to let your email marketing endeavours fall by the wayside.
It turns out that this could be a huge mistake. Email marketing is still an enormous part of many businesses’ successes, and it has a multitude of benefits that other marketing disciplines just can’t emulate. Here’s why email marketing is still relevant, and why you shouldn’t write it off as part of your marketing strategy.
It boasts better reach than any other marketing method
Social media marketing has developed a reputation as a way to connect with thousands upon thousands of potential customers. Facebook is the world’s biggest social network, with 1.65bn monthly active users recorded in the first quarter of 2016. Instagram (owned by Facebook) boasts 400m monthly active users, while Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Pinterest all have somewhere between 100m and 300m monthly active users.
But compare these figures to email. The last survey in 2013 estimated that there’d be 4.3bn email accounts by the end of this year, with that figure expected to rise to 4.9bn by 2017. Email is still the primary method to contact people online, and there’s no other marketing channel with this incredible reach.
Recipients will read your messages
Continuing with the social media comparisons, posts on Facebook and Twitter are easily missed by users. If they’re not online when the update is posted, it’s likely they’ll never see it, and the update will simply sink lower down their News Feed, having little or no impact on most users.
By contrast, experts estimate that 90% of emails get delivered to the intended recipients inbox, and your email message is 45 times more likely to be read than a Facebook status update.
Email marketing penetrates all devices
Many online business owners are currently concerned with ensuring their website is responsive – that is, ensuring that it can be viewed properly on a tablet, smartphone or another mobile device. With email, there’s no such problem. Email is totally responsive, and can be opened on any device without any particular effort on your part. In fact, it’s believed that as many as two-thirds of all emails are now being opened on mobile devices, which makes it easier to contact your customer base on-the-go.
Email marketing has a personal touch
Introducing a sense of personalization into your marketing is essential in 2016. Consumers have grown bored of traditional marketing and advertising – they’re able to filter it out like never before. The new era of marketing is all about reaching out on a personal level and connecting with a consumer – and email is streets ahead when it comes to developing these connections. Not only can you customise your message for certain audiences, you can also separate your audience into segments based on factors like purchase behaviour, gender, age, location and more. This allows you to create tailored messages that appeal more directly to certain sections of your client base, rather than using the dated, generic methods of old.
