You heard that you should grow your list. It’s repetitive, and it feels like a rallying cry Internet-wide. Marketers, Smart businesses, bloggers, and online publishers — they all swear by email marketing.
Why? What’s so sexy about the “un-sexy” email?
I used to tell everyone who cares to listen that email marketing is like the wife — she takes care of the home. She births, raises, and cares for your children. Without her, your home crumbles.
The only problem? You don’t think that much of a “wife”. In fact, a wife is usually taken for granted (don’t ask me if I can prove it since I am nobody’s wife).
Email marketing is as old as email itself, and this goes back several years since the dawn of the Internet.
There’s a problem with old things. We think they don’t work as well as the “shiny, new” things do. You know? Things like social media, push notifications, fancy ad platforms, Real-time bidding, mobile advertising.
You do those or you don’t. But one thing you should be doing is email marketing.
Why, you ask? Let’s see:
Consider these email marketing stats:
General email marketing stats
By the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will increase to 2.9 billion (that’s over 1/3rd of the entire worldwide population) [Source: Radicati ]
The number of emails sent and received per day totaled 205 billion in 2015. By the end of 2022, that number will grow to 334 billion [Source: Radicati ]
92% of all online adults use email [Source: Pew Research ]
These number will grow again, the next time you come back to read this. You’ll come back, won’t you?
What’s the ROI of Email Marketing?
Email marketing gives you an ROI of 4400%. Thats $44 for every $1 in spend (Try to beat that) [Source: Campaign Monitor ]
Now, do you think you should spend all that time on SEO? or PPC? or Social Media? Think about it.
Leads Nurtured by email marketing make for 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads [Source: Annuitas Group]
Explains why you need to have marketing automation workflows
Email Conversion rates are 40X those of Facebook and Twitter [Source: McKinsey & Company]
It’s time you let go of the “social media” fever. Do it for the right reasons but don’t depend on it for revenue.
As long as you keep emails relevant, they drive 18x more revenue than simple broadcast emails (newsletter, anyone?) [Source: Jupiter Research]
Achieve higher relevance with proper email best practices such as segmentation, tagging, or grouping of subscribers and customers, because…
Email Segmentation = More Power
42% of marketers do not send targeted email messages; only 4% use layered targeting. (MarketingProfs, 2016)
83% of companies use at least basic segmentation for their emails. (Econsultancy, 2016)
The ability to segment email lists and individualize email campaign messaging are the most effective personalization tactics for 51% and 50% of marketing influencers respectively. (Ascend2, 2016)
Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue. (The Direct Marketing Association, 2015) [Source: HubSpot]
It’s not surprising why that happens, which leads us to…
Email Personalization
If you could send a welcome note to your subscribers, they are 33% more likely to engage with you long-term [ Source: chiefmarketer.com]
Personalized emails boost click-through rates by 14% and conversions by 10% at least [Source: Aberdeen Group]
Relevance comes from personalization. Do you have that “personality layer” for your marketing?
Email subject lines that include the words “thank you” have the highest above-average engagement levels. (Adestra, 2015)
Quick check: Do your transactional emails, order updates, cart abandonment emails have “thank you” in them?
Emails that included the first name of the recipient in their subject line had higher clickthrough rates than emails that did not. (HubSpot, 2014)
Comes back to personalization. Today’s ESPs like Drip, MailChimp, and Convertkit make this easier.
The open rate for emails with a personalized message was 17.6%, compared to 11.4% without personalization (Source: Statista, 2014)
Enough said.
Email Marketing Vs Social Media
There’s just too much noise about social media, Social media ROI, and this and that.
It’s just not as effective as it’s hyped to be. It’s good for networking, branding, impressions, and all that jazz.
The average click through rate for your Twitter update us 1.64% (& Facebook reach + conversion is even worse [source: Sign-up.to]
To get into even more granular detail about just where social media stands compared to email marketing, here’s an awesome table from OptinMonster, thanks to Mary Fernandez in 2016
Credit: OptinMonster
Customers acquired by email have 12% higher lifetime value than average, whereas customers acquired through Facebook have only 1% higher lifetime value than average.
Don’t argue with me on social media ROI, ever again.
Email marketing Vs Paid Ads
Paid ads are the fastest way to help grow your business. I think that if you run paid advertisements pointing to landing pages that focus on collecting leads (and hence grow your email list), it’s a super combination.
If you just did PPC, however, it doesn’t deliver as well as email marketing does.
According to Litmus,
Email: $40 for every $1 spent
Keyword ads: $17 for every $1 spent
Banner ads: $2 for every $1 spentClick-Through Rates
Email: 5%
Banner ads: 0.8%
Rich-media banners: 0.14%Conversion rates
Email also has higher conversion rates per session than search and social combined, found a report by Monetate:
Email: 4.15%
Search: 2.64%
Social: 0.48%
Now, what gives?
Email Marketing Vs Other Distractors online
About 77% of consumers prefer email over social media for permission-based promotional messages [Source: OptinMonster]
And you’ll still spend all that time and money on social media?
Email marketing Stats – others
Thanks to The Hubspot Inbound Report, here are some more stats:
54% of marketers say increasing engagement rate is their top email marketing priority. [Source: Hubspot, Ascend2 2016]
This should be 100% for every business out there. Eh?
11 a.m. ET has the highest clickthrough rate for email sends. (HubSpot, 2015)
Try that.
15% of marketers surveyed say their company still does not regularly review email opens and clicks; only 23% say they have integrated their website and emails to track what happens after a click. (MarketingProfs, 2016)
When technology is available for everyone to use, what’s stopping you?
Email notifications about abandoned carts have a 40.5% open rate. (eMarketer, 2015)
Makes sense to do the 5 minute job of setting up these “cart abandonment emails” now?
As the number of images in an email increases, the clickthrough rate of the email tends to decrease. [Source: HubSpot, 2014)
Simple lesson: Try pure text emails. You’ll also save your emails from getting into the “promotion” tab, or getting marked as spam for no reason.
Email Marketing Copy, Text, Elements
64% of people prefer rich text emails. (HubSpot, 2014)
Your email marketing can, however, suffer if you go overboard with HTML or images. Rich text can be “rich” in value?
Nearly half (47%) of marketers say they sometimes test alternate subject lines to optimize email performance. (MarketingProfs, 2016)
Are you doing A/B tests? If you aren’t, start today.
The Email Addiction
More than 58% of adults (worldwide) check email, the first thing in the morning [ Source: Ezanga]
People check their smartphones up to (wait for it) 150x per day [Source: kpcb.com]
There’s a chance that you could be in their pipeline, every single morning — and beyond — through the rest of their day.
Make Email Marketing Work for you
You’ll be astonished at what you’d find when you calculate the value of a subscriber — and also every visitor, if you treat them right — is worth for your business.
Bryan Harris of VideoFruit also has a handy calculator for you to determine what an email subscriber is worth to your business.
Go ahead. Calculate your email subscriber value.
Tell me if you should focus on email marketing or not.
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