Email Marketing: Not Dead, Yet [+ Examples]

If you thought email marketing is dead (in this day and age of raging social media use), you are wrong.

Psssst….Here’s a secret: If you — for a moment — step out of the crowded Internet pathways of the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and all the other developed nations, Email Is not even Born.

About 99% of “all” businesses in “all” countries outside of the western civilization “don’t use email marketing” effectively. I just made that number up (don’t bother fact checking).

I just made that number up (don’t bother fact checking).

Those “other” countries make up for 3/4th of the total global population, so I kid you not.

1. Email is Just born

Email Is not Dead. Repeat: Email is not dead

For more than 85% of the businesses in the world, Email Marketing didn’t even begin.

Amir Jirbandey of MailJet thankfully compiled a few fancy charts and numbers that you should look at.

US takes the lead. UK is next. Germany, France, and the rest of the European nations fall in next. The rest of the world including China, India, Brazil, South Korea — they aren’t even on the list.

Just to complete the thread we started, here’s a breakdown of which Industries send more email?

Whether you are in the Continental US, Europe, China, or India, Email Is Still alive. It’s not surviving, but thriving.

2. These Guys Went to war With Email

Pop Quiz: What’s common between the following:

* Dmitry Dragiilev, Founder of JustReachOut
* Iris Shoor, Co-founder of Takipi (now Overops.com)
* Sam Parr, founder of HustleCon
* David Of Death to Stock Photo

They all swear by email. For them, it was email marketing that got them to do what they did. Tremendous success. Lots of hustle.

For them, email wasn’t just some content thrown in hoping to click and bait customers. Email proved to be a rainmaker for them, and it ought to do something for each of us.

3. Email Helps In Building an entire business

David, founder of Death to Stock photo, started his business making “email” itself the product. He managed to get 100,000 subscribers in 18 months flat (and he continues to do so).

At The Death to the Stock site, his home page has a signup form above the fold, and you can see that he makes the signup part frictionless.

He says:

A lot of companies will say ‘Join our list and get a free e-book.’ We don’t say that. But when people sign up, we give them something free. It’s a nice surprise.

and this:

“Our secret is that we spend just as much time on free subscribers as we do premium subscribers.”

and this:

“Even if you’re giving away free content, it should be held to a high standard.”

If email was all you had, and there was nothing else (like social, PPC, or anything else), how would you treat it?

4. Cold Email Is Scalable

Dmitry Dragilev of Criminally Prolific has a huge post with examples (will make your head spin) about how cold email helped him and several other entrepreneurs.

Cold emails helped him and several others score deals, make friends with influencers, get business, generate leads, generate press, help you pitch better, or just gain exposure to their respective companies.

5. Transactional Emails: The Forgotten Stars

Transactional emails boast of incredibly high open rates and click rates. Yet, these set of emails are almost always ignored.

According to Experian, transactional emails have 8X more opens and clicks than another type of email.

You need to look no further than Derek Sivers’ now popular shipping confirmation email to see what a single transactional email can do for your business:

Then, there are practical, loveable, effective, and very smart transactional emails too:

Twitter

How many times have you clicked through these emails to find out who just followed you?

Then, there are some functional emails, that just work:

Evernote

Tell me if you wouldn’t want to “Sign in”?

DropBox

Strict utility with the ever popular design language. Simplicity at its best.

GoPro

Are you stoked about your GoPro account yet?

Medium

Makes you want to read more, check your stats, download the app, and do more medium publishing.

6. Emails Are Great For Announcements

When you launch, the world should know about it. Even better, your subscribers should know about it because they love you, they probably invested, and they did take the trouble to sign up.

A few companies do this remarkably well:

FlyWheel

For a premium WordPress hosting company, Flywheel uses a playful language, feels casual, and the company wants to keep it light and fun.

Asana

Colourful design is a welcome addition to our otherwise drab inboxes. Those Gifs are a pleasure to look at, and they are functional as in they show you what’s new anyway.

GoSquared

I admit I love everything about GoSquared, and that includes their emails. Here’s how they announced their new iOS and Android App.

7. Emails Stay in Inboxes

Guess what? Most of these emails have been fished out of my own Inbox. What does that tell you about email?

Emails stay in Inboxes, unless you delete them. Even you do delete emails, you’d still remember who you just deleted.

When you unsubscribed, there’s still some brand equity left in the whole act of Unsubscribing.

8. Emails Helps You Personalise Messages

Nothing gives you the power to personalize your messages as much as emails do.

Personalized email messages improve click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10%, according to Aberdeen.

Personalize subject lines and you’ll see your open rates shoot up by 26% while giving you 6X higher transaction rates. According to DMA , segmented and targeted emails generate a whopping 58% of all revenue.

Anyway, it just makes sense to use your customers’ name within an email message instead of writing “customer”.

Are you using email marketing the right way? Tell me about it.