Regardless of the reasons why it’s still popular and despite its shortcomings, email still stands out as the perfect communication channel for today’s marketers. It’s the best online marketing you could invest your time and money in.
THE POWER OF EMAIL MARKETING
Why email marketing will continue to grow
Updated 15 April 2021
Written by Omneya Nabil
Content Alchemist & Brand Storyteller
Email marketing is a cost-effective solution that gives businesses the power to reach customers in a place most people visit every day — their inbox. Used as part of your inbound strategy, email marketing can and will take your communication to the next level.
Email marketing has recently emerged as a buzzword among seasoned marketers, but its history goes back a long time. The very first email was sent in 1971 by Raymond Tomlinson, a computer engineer and app developer. He sent the email to himself and chose the @ symbol to represent sending messages from one user’s computer to another. Almost five decades later, email is now used daily by more than half of the world’s population – and it’s not just for work.
Understanding email consumption
Modern-day people are consuming email more than any other communication channel, despite how flooded their inboxes are. So, what is it that drives people to continuously check their inboxes? It could be the guilt overshadowed by the growing number of unread emails. It could also be triggered by their FOMO (fear of missing out) on an important project update or a one-time promotional offer. Or it could be that the email was so interesting and appealing to them in a way that made it absolutely unavoidable.
Email Open Rates are what matter most to a marketer, and what gets people to open an email message – your email message – depends mainly on 3 factors:
1. A subject line that captures attention and offers a genuine benefit. A study published on HubSpot found that 64% of people said “not being interested in an email subject line” was the reason for not opening an email.
2. Relevant content that is newsworthy and generates curiosity. Another HubSpot survey found that 38% of the survey responders said they signed up for a company newsletter hoping to receive information that is relevant to them.
3. Personalized messages that speak to your audience directly and meets their needs or expectations. A report published by Experian Marketing Services revealed that including personalized product recommendations into transactional emails generates a 20% increase in revenues.
Surviving the email bottleneck
Yes, there’s too much email today, and it comes in all shapes, colours and emojis. There are important emails and others that are the wrong sort, from the wrong bunch (think spam). There are work emails, social media notification emails, promotional emails, and even newsletters from sites you don’t remember signing up to. You might be wondering why you even need to consider marketing through email when it could easily be marked as spam or get lost among the countless unread and long-forgotten messages.
The good news is, email providers now include tools and features to help filter out the good sort of emails and directly push fishy emails from fishy addresses to your spam/junk folder. While Outlook includes “focus” and “other” tabs, Gmail has gone further to automatically categorize your received emails as primary, social, and promotions. It’s a good idea to use a service like iSnotSPAM, MailGun, or GlockApps to test how your email scores in the spam department before blasting it out. This gives your email a better chance of survival and higher open and click-throughs rates.
Conclusion: Email marketing will prevail
People love personalized messages, and email marketing gives them just that. Showing your customers that they matter to your business will trigger more engagement. Email marketing is also the most affordable and cost-efficient form of marketing outreach. Its measurable results allow you to quantify your Return on Investment (ROI). Because of its mobile-friendly nature, emails can be viewed on anytime, anywhere, and with a strong call-to-action, it can take your engagement levels to the next level.