1. Email Marketing Sells Products Better Than social media and web ads
People stay in touch with social media. They browse sites for information and diversion. But they buy products from email. The good folks at Custora, a company specializing in online marketing, compile data based on their sizable list of retail clients. The chart below shows that the percentage of customers acquired from email campaigns handily beats out the combined percentage coming from advertising on Facebook, Twitter, banner ads, and affiliate marketing (Visit their post for more interesting findings). So while people spend a lot of time on social media and on their favorite websites, email marketing works better at getting people to actually buy products.
2. Email Marketing is Personal
This is possibly the best reason why email marketing works. Done right, it is more than just your latest offer, or your newest product, it’s also a reminder of why they were interested in your business in the first place. Done right, your email campaign is more than a promotion—it is a way to build and enhance community. In fact, email marketing works best when it’s personal, genuine, and informative.
3. Startup is Cheap
Email Service Providers (ESP) like MailChimp and ConstantContact are your best bet for sending out bulk emails (you shouldn’t use your own email because it’s not really built for that kind of volume, it’s much harder to measure results, and your email address could get blacklisted as SPAM). ESPs charge based on how many thousands of emails you send, or a flat monthly rate. And they provide great tools for creating and managing campaigns and mailing lists for that same fee.
Cost Areas You Should Consider:
- Sending emails. For marketers, that’s usually via an Email Service Provider.
- Managing your email lists. Again, usually handled by your ESP.
- Strategy and management. Coming up with goals, tracking performance, creating the emails, and scheduling everything takes some thought capital.
- Creative and production. Whatever your workflow and staffing configuration, you will need to account for writing, designing (including art), coding, and for the time it takes to upload everything to your ESP.
- Your mailing list. Whether it’s through a form on your website, special promotions, conference and trade show attendance, or other more inventive ways, there are costs here.
4. Tremendous Potential Return on Your Investment
Dedication to your campaign and the ability to change things up based on your past campaigns will reap great benefits. VB Insight’s 2015 email marketing survey participants said they were seeing a 222% return on investment (read the entire post). I’ve heard ROI figures as high as 500%.
5. Email Marketing Campaigns are Extremely Measurable
You can use tools and technology to test versions of your email to figure out, say, if your audience responds better to longer copy, or if they prefer emails sent on Tuesday mornings rather than Friday afternoons, or they like bigger images, or any other creative aspect of your email. With good testing practices, you can get a picture of your relationship to your audience and customize your campaigns to fit your goals instead of relying on second-hand knowledge from outdated or irrelevant sources.
6. Nearly Everyone Uses Email
There will be an estimated 5.6 billion email accounts held by 3 billion users worldwide by end-of-year 2019 (that’s an average annual growth rate of 6%), according to a report from The Radicati Group.