Decoding Email Marketing’s Reign as the King of Digital Communication

For over a decade, email marketing has been the King of direct marketing channels! It’s a great way to move consumers through your conversion funnel. Moreover, it’s less expensive, easier to track and more scalable than other digital channels. It also gives you a backup plan should other channels fail. 

Why email marketing is king?

With a large number of digital marketing channels today, you may wonder why email marketing is still one of the most widely used channels among consumers and marketers alike. It’s because you can get thousands of leads in a matter of days rather than months or even years and that’s exactly why email marketing should be your number one priority. If you combine that with professional email marketing software, you’re going to go far. However, most email campaigns are treated as a loss leader, meaning they generate leads for the company even when they fail. Let’s dig deeper!

Why do people trust email marketing?

Email marketing is considered as the most trusted form of communication for brands to engage with their consumers. It’s also one of the most effective channels for most businesses because it provides repeat customers, awareness, and insight into what’s going on in the business. The power of the email marketing platform comes from the technology (in this case, email) and the way it makes collaboration easier than ever before. 

What is the role of email marketing in this hyper-digital era?

Email remains the gold standard for cultivating leads and closing deals. It delivers content that has proven actionable value; cross-channel marketing and message follow-up mean that email retains its efficacy over social media and other channels for the moment. 

80% of marketers reveal that email is the best performing media buy. A survey by ExactTarget reveals that 77% of consumers chose emails over other online channels. In fact, according to a survey conducted by Statista in 2020, the number of email subscribers is expected to grow up to 4.48 billion across the globe by 2024. That might be because the web continues to rely on email as its primary delivery channel, even in the face of mobile-first and other emerging options. 

Why is email marketing a cost-effective channel?

⏩ This might seem boring but email marketing is actually one of the most cost-effective methods of marketing out there. This is due to the fact that it has a high return on investment and that you can reach people on any device at any time without spending much money. A study found that email marketing generates 40X revenue for every dollar spent on marketing products.

⏩ Marketers tend to focus on social media or paid search, since those are the channels that have a high cost per click or impression. However, for most businesses, email is the perfect channel for lead generation. One of the major reasons is because it can be customized based on customer data — all for a fraction of the cost of Google AdWords.

⏩ We have entered the golden era of marketing automation and customer engagement. And it’s no secret that email is still the most effective channel when it comes to customer engagement. Thanks to the efforts of these famous ESPs, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Epsilon, Get Response, MailChimp, Vision6, Campaign Monitor, Adobe Marketing Cloud, Constant Contact, AWeber, mapp, Kenscio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud and many other email marketing platforms, there are thousands of templates to choose from and many possible connections you can set up – which will allow you to automate and segment your campaigns, delivering messages that are personalized, automated and timely. The most interesting part is in 2019 survey done by Campaign Monitor itself revealed that marketers who used segmented campaigns noted as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

⏩ Email marketing comes with its own set of challenges and personalization is one of the important keys to win over these challenges due to an ever-changing marketing landscape of the hyper-digital era or even beyond. Email trends like open-time personalisation help your email stream reflect shared values to encourage engagement and eventually, pays dividends in conversions. A dynamic email marketing platform like RTP (Real-Time Personalisation), can create time-sensitive and irresistible content in real-time and can add tremendous value to various marketing & promotional activities. RTP can also help improve your email marketing strategies with an integrated and data-driven approach.

⏩With recent innovations in email marketing, it’s now even easier to target the desired market and allow each communication from you to be more personal and relevant. Google AMP is one of such amazing trends and the latest emerging buzzword in email marketing. With the help of interactivity, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) can turn emails into a live dynamic, web page-like experience. Many famous brands like Booking.com and Pinterest have already started investing in AMP technology as it is a Google-backed project which is likely to get more popular in the near future.

What are the major benefits of email marketing?

Email Marketing has some of the best ROI’s. It’s the most personal marketing channel we have, and if you know your market you can achieve very high conversion rates (30% is totally achievable). With email marketing integration with social media, mobile and apps (and with some better CRM systems out there), it has proven over time to be a more effective tool than ever.

Should you consider email marketing to be a part of your marketing strategy?

Most marketers would agree that marketing through email is one of the most effective methods to reach a large group of people without spending a fortune. Recent estimates reveal over 4 billion worldwide users have active email accounts and send more than 300 billion emails every single day. These numbers are expected to be even higher by 2025, which is 4.6 billion worldwide users with around 376.4 billion emails daily. Be it a start-up, a small/mid-size business (SME/SMB) or even a large enterprise, businesses are investing in email marketing on a massive scale.

Key Takeaway: To win over your user’s heart, begin with the email marketing strategy and convert it into a habit with these simple tips:

1. Get started on an email marketing channel
2. Start out simple with easy to digest emails
3. Offer valuable content that your users will actually engage with
4. Don’t send out irrelevant emails, let your subscribers decide what they want to see
5. Timing is the key. Segment your user list and plan your send-time according to customer behaviour. 

Fun facts!   
According to Litmus, 2019, 21% of email opens happens between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. in the U.S.

Conclusion: Email marketing has been a staple in the marketing world for decades, and there’re many reasons behind it. Email is still ruling all channels. As the amount of digital business conducted doubles every five years, so does the importance of email marketing. It’s not just about blasting out your latest promotion or discount code; instead, email is used to build trust with your customers through educational content that they are genuinely interested in. Hence, email is the premier digital marketing channel that delivers a high ROI and produces measurable results. Email marketing is a cost-effective, direct, targeted, permission-based and measurable way for marketers to communicate with their audience.