Why Use Email Marketing?

There’s a lot of bullshit marketing advice out there and I am worried that you are spending way too much time reading that same advice and wasting away even more time before you end up working every day in a way that makes a difference to your business.

Forget blogging, SEO, social media, PPC, and whatever it is that you end up reading about.

While this might be repetitive, here’s the first thing you should do if you want to actually do something that makes a difference to your business.

Grow your email list.

Repetitive? Hell, yes.

But are you doing it? I doubt, barring a few exceptions.

In fact, most of the small businesses in the world have absolutely no strategy in place to build their email list.

Forget that email list. Most businesses barely do any kind of digital marketing at all.

The 2017 Small Business Conversion Marketing Report, thanks to the folks at Drip, has a few email marketing statistics that you should note: Out of 1003 small businesses surveyed, thanks to Drip, see what came up

• 82.1% of respondents with no website spend under 2 hours a week on marketing, compared to 49.7% of the general survey population.
• 27.7% of highly successful lead generators spend more than 24 hours a week on marketing, compared with 7.3% of those who are unsuccessfully trying to capture leads.
• Just 7.4% of respondents can both capture leads and convert customers from their website.
• Just 23.2% of respondents use landing pages, and 21.9% have blogs.
• However, 27.2% of businesses using landing pages and 21.3% of businesses have great success generating leads—double the lead-gen success rate of the survey panel as a whole.
• Just 27.7% of small businesses use digital advertising of any kind—but those who do have twice as much success making sales online.
• Only 22.7% of small businesses use a formal, software-based system to follow up with their leads, such as an email marketing service, an automation platform, or a CRM.

Social media really feels like that shiny object that doesn’t seem to let go, eh?

Excitement is where Little Promise is

Most businesses today tend to do what we all did historically.

Follow the herd.

Some influencer says “guest blogging” and everyone and their cousin is doing just that.
Guest blogging is major time suck, as I wrote before.

Social media is huge right? Yes, it is. Except that you are probably doing it all wrong and there’s nothing much to show for it.

If you noticed the survey results, all businesses (the ones that are doing something) seem to focus all that time and energy on blogging, websites, and social media. Meanwhile, email marketing is the really the money maker here, and you have these email marketing stats to prove that.

Plus, there’s more. 350 business owners revealed what they do in a survey by Clutch. More than 41% of them share content and engage with followers on social media. About 50% of them plan to “increase time” on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. Oh boy, and over 50% rely on in-house staff for social media marketing.

That’s sad.

Twitter has an uncertain future, Instagram does not play well for every business, and YouTube takes more time than managing social media. Let’s not even get near Pinterest yet.

Email marketing Destroys Everything Else

If it was just marketers and Email marketing service providers harping about how awesome email marketing was, I’d have ignored it.

When I started using Drip, however, things seem so different.

But ignore me. Let’s just get the data to speak for itself.

According to Martin Zhel of Mail Munch,

“…if you have 2,000 email subscribers, 2,000 Facebook fans and 2,000 followers on Twitter – this is what you will get:
• 435 people will open your email
• 120 Facebook fans will see your message
• 40 Twitter followers will see your message
”

The average email open rate is at 21% and it delivers the highest ROI compared to any other channel.

How much ROI, you ask?

How about 122% median ROI?

24% of email marketers in the United States, thanks to a survey from Relevancy Group, attributed more than a quarter of their overall revenues thanks to email marketing – only thanks to growth in email user base.
In 2014, more than 68% of businesses surveyed rated email marketing as the best channel in terms of ROI.
Enough said?

Email Marketing has more to it than ROI

Modern day email marketing isn’t just about “emails”

There’s advanced automation, personalizing emails to segments of users, use of conditioning logic to ensure that you only send out the most relevant of the emails to your subscribers, lead scoring which starts off an automated VIP nurturing for most engaged email subscribers, and a direct tie-in with sales and purchases, if you used the right email marketing provider.

Now, do you still want to be adamant and spend 40 hours a day on Social media or do you want to take 40 minutes to craft some meaningful autoresponders and email marketing workflows?