7 Reasons You’re Missing Easy Money by Ignoring Email Marketing

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There’s no denying it: email marketing increases customer loyalty and profitability.

Yet somehow, email marketing doesn’t have as many blogs dedicated to it as social media or SEO do. If you think about it, you really never see anyone promoting themselves as an “email marketing guru.”

Although email generally stays out of the limelight, it remains the lifeblood of the internet. Think of it as your online passport. You use your email to sign up to websites like Facebook and Instagram, Netflix and countless others.


Yet businesses both large and small continue to ignore email.

The truth is, many businesses simply haven’t realised the power of email marketing and why they’re making a huge mistake by not building a database.

If you’re still on the fence about email marketing, keep reading to find out how you’re losing countless sales opportunities every day you wait to build your list.
 

1. You Own Your List

Your subscriber database is yours – at least as long as you continue to provide value to your subscribers.

Think about Facebook for a minute. We used to be told to spend time posting and growing our community in order to get more customers. Some of us even paid to advertise our pages to build that community.

Now we’re told that we need to advertise to reach our followers with updates. With organic reach figures below 10% and as low as 2%, the message is clear: we do not own our Facebook database and therefore have no control over them.

This conundrum doesn’t exist in the email world.
 

2. Significant Return On Investment

This is the big one isn’t it? We want to be able to measure our ROI in email.

Let’s look at a few studies…

In a commissioned study, Econsultancy reports that “email marketing was ranked as the best channel in terms of return on investment.”

Jay Baer at Convince and Convert also highlights two key points:

  1. People who buy products marketed through email spend 138% more than people who do not receive email offers.
  2. 12.44% of email recipients made at least one purchase last year based on a promotional email.

McKinsey & Company makes a compelling comparison to the sexy social media, noting “The rate at which emails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17% higher.”

How about this one from Experian to sum up the ROI of email: “For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return is $44.25.”

The facts speak for themselves. Email marketing works – and it works well.
 

3. It’s the Ultimate Lead Generation Tool

As businesses, we’re always looking to acquire more customers. But how does email stack up against social in this particular instance?

A McKinsey & Company study found that “Email remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media – nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined.” Wow!

That’s not to discourage people from using social media, but when it comes to generating leads – which should be high on your priority list – email is clearly more powerful.

So why aren’t you building an email database?
 

4. Easier to Retarget Prospects

With the help of new advertising technology, we have some excellent ways of targeting our advertising across the web and within social platforms.

If you’ve advertised on Facebook before, you’re probably already aware that you can create a ‘Custom Audience’ using your email database.

If you’re not, this means you now have the ability to target your Facebook ads to your email database. Be aware though, Facebook needs to be able to find a profile linked to the email address. You can also do this on Twitter.

Retargeting, or ‘Remarketing’ as Google brands it, is a great way to reach out to customers who have shown previous interest. Traditionally, this means using banner advertisements across the web to target people who have already visited your website. However, in this instance you can use your email database to advertise to them.

This is incredibly helpful when you have a compelling offer and want to make sure the subscribers who didn’t open your email are aware of the opportunity. This is significantly better for click-through rates than standard banners.
 

5. More People Use Email Than Social Media

If Facebook was a country, it would be the largest in the world with a staggering 1.39 billion members worldwide. That’s one compelling statistic.

But how does that number stack up to email?

According to the Radicrati Group, the number of email accounts worldwide is “expected to increase to 4.9 billion by the end of 2017.”

That number blows social out of the water and is just one more reason you should be jumping on the email bandwagon.
 

6. Email Is Fast

You send an email campaign and it instantly hits your subscribers’ inboxes.

This is the opposite of using traditional forms of communication like print, outdoor and television, where you have to wait for the message to be delivered.

Although social media posts can also be delivered immediately, we need to look at how often we check our email versus how often we check Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Mashable reported in a study that indicates the average person “checks their email 15 times a day.” By comparison, the Daily Mail in the UK reports that “the average person checks Facebook 13.8 times a day.” That’s pretty close.

At the same token, we need to consider that organic reach on Facebook is likely only 11%, which highlights a major advantage of email over Facebook.
 

7. More Opportunities to Segment and Personalise

One of the tactics that provides email marketers with better open rates, click rates and general ROI is personalisation/segmentation. It’s really two tactics, but they’re similar in nature.

Good email marketers segment their lists to deliver more targeted content. Better-targeted content greatly improves the value for the recipient, and results in higher conversions.

MailChimp, one of the leading online email service providers, sampled 2,000 users who sent 11,000 segmented campaigns earlier this year. The results indicated that segmented email campaigns drove a 13.46% increase in open rates and a whopping 53.05% increase in click rates. Google+ allows us to create circles and distribute relevant content, but as far as Facebook, Twitter and other social platforms are concerned, there’s no possible way to segment your audience like you can with email.

Personalisation is the practice of adding your recipient’s name or other personal details in the subject line, or within your email or newsletter.

Marketing Land reports on a study by Experian, highlighting that “personalised promotional mailings had 29 percent higher open rates and 41 percent higher unique click rates.”

You can’t get those numbers with Facebook or Twitter, and you definitely can’t get those numbers with TV, radio or print.
 

The Future of Email Marketing

A number of things are declared dead before their time. In today’s marketing landscape, print has been declared dead prematurely.

But the numbers just don’t lie: email is still very much alive and one of the leading marketing vehicles available today.

If you’re not actively building your database, then get started –and get started now.

If you’re unsure how to break into email marketing or need help getting more subscribers, we can help. Contact us and we’ll devise a plan, together.

     

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Quentin Aisbett
Quentin is a co-founder and the SEO strategist of the Australian-based agency Searcht. He is an information-hungry Gen Xer, often found lurking in the deepest corners of a client's Google Analytics on a quest to dig up something insightful. With 12+years of SEO experience, he’s the man behind Searcht's 5-star client reviews and a regular contributor to GoDaddy.

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