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5 Reasons Why You Should Invest In Email (With Stats)
Digital marketing is an essential part of all business and, while social media and search engine results are great, there are dozens of reasons why you should invest in email marketing.
The statistics don’t lie. Read on to discover the reasons why you should invest in email, as well as why it’s such a vital piece of your marketing puzzle.
The importance of email in your digital marketing strategy
The marketing world has gone back and forth over whether email marketing is a dead art for some time. Well, the final consensus is in: Email isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. That said, if you haven’t jumped on the email marketing bandwagon yet, it’s time.
The total number of email users worldwide topped 3.9 billion in 2019, and forecasts suggest that it’s going to continue to rise to nearly 4.481 billion by 2024.
And, when it came to the total number of emails sent and received every day in 2019, the numbers came in at around 293.6 billion, with that number also expected to rise and hit a total of 347.3 billion by 2023.
Those numbers alone should be considered when trying to decide if you should add email marketing to your digital marketing strategy. This is especially true if your focus has been primarily your local market and you’re looking to expand to an even greater market.
Plan your email marketing calendar.
5 reasons you should invest in email
While your ideal target audience may not be everyone in that 3.9 billion consumer target utilizing email, that doesn’t mean you won’t have a nearly unlimited market to tap into—making email marketing well worth the investment.
If you’re still on the fence of whether this strategy is worth your time and resources, here are five additional reasons why you should invest in email marketing.
1. Email generates the single most ROI than any other digital marketing channel.
One reason some marketing professionals, especially those with smaller businesses, have yet to invest in email marketing is that they’re short on funds, and they aren’t sure if email would be a worthwhile investment. For example, during our study into the state of small business in 2019, we actually saw that there was a 12% decrease in points when it came to those who prefer email marketing for building brand awareness.
While social media has become an ever-popular option for many digital marketers, it doesn’t provide the same return on investment (ROI) than email marketing does.
Source: Campaign Monitor
It’s difficult for marketers to determine an ideal ROI for social media because there are so many moving parts involved in this tactic. Approximately 60% of marketing professionals find measuring social media ROI as one of the most challenging in social media marketing.
With email marketing, the moving parts are all intertwined and simple to monitor for success, and calculating your overall ROI is easy. For the last 10 years, email marketing has produced the highest ROI of all digital marketing channels, coming in at approximately 3800%. That comes out to an average of $38 for every $1 spent.
2. Your consumers prefer email over other channels for communication.
Another reason you should invest in email marketing is that your consumers prefer this method of communication. With approximately 2.3 billion smartphone users worldwide in 2019, this shouldn’t come as a surprise to most marketers.
While SMS and chatbots are continuing to rise in popularity—thanks to the consumers’ need for instant information, when it comes to regular and promotional content—83% of consumers state that they prefer to hear from their favorite brands via email.
Global Study: Consumer Engagement Best Practices for 2020
Source: Twilio
3. Email is where you’ll reach your mobile users the most.
With so many consumers preferring to hear from their favorite brands via email over other digital marketing channels, it’s crucial to know how these individuals are viewing your messages. Nearly 94% of consumers are “annoyed” by the communications they receive from businesses because 33% of all consumers are being contacted via the wrong communication channel.
Of the 2.3 billion smartphone users worldwide, nearly 78% of them are using their devices for checking their email, with web browsing and Facebook coming in at second and third, respectively, for most popular activities on smartphones.
Source: IDC & Facebook Always Connected Report
That means email marketing is not only an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, but that those who utilize it must be catering to those who are using their mobile devices to view their email communications.
The best ways to cater to those individuals is by:
- Ensuring you’re utilizing mobile-friendly email templates
- Keeping your email message simple to navigate
- Keeping CTAs easy to spot and click on
With email and Facebook in the top activities on smartphones, it’s worth noting that 90% of emails will get delivered to the recipient’s inbox. While social media is a worthwhile investment on its own, you won’t see the same results as you will with email marketing.
4. Email marketing helps boost sales.
With more businesses forced to maneuver into contactless communications and ecommerce sales instead of in-store sales, they’re finding it difficult to drive the necessary traffic to their online stores.
Email marketing is a powerful tool for those looking to drive conversions. It generates some of the highest open and click-through rates compared to other channels.
- Average email open rate across all industries: 17.8%
- Average email click-to-open rate across all industries: 14.3%
- Average email click-through rate across all industries: 2.6%
Email can help boost your brand’s sales because it can hook consumers and draw them to your website or a particular landing page. While the body content of your email is essential to capturing the reader’s attention and piquing their overall interest, you want to make sure you’re utilizing the right CTAs.
There are typically two types of CTAs that email marketers use to get their readers to click through to their website:
- A direct sales CTA
- An indirect sales CTA
Source: Really Good Emails
A direct sales CTA is just that: a call to take a specific action, such as the “Buy Now” CTA used in the email example above.
An indirect sales CTA is one that doesn’t tell your readers to go make a purchase. Rather, it pulls them in for more information, such as the “Learn More” CTAs utilized in the email example above. The idea behind an indirect sales CTA is to lead your reader to decide to act of their own accord. Whether it be a purchase, a download, or signup—these are all conversions, and an indirect sales CTA makes readers believe it’s their decision to follow through, as compared to a direct sales CTA that tells them to take action.
Regardless of which type of CTA you choose, your email has to be both informational and encouraging to get your readers excited to make the desired conversion. With a combination of excellent body content and the right CTA, brands have the potential of increasing their clicks by 371% and their sales by approximately 1617%, according to some studies.
5. Allows you to get to know your targeted audience better.
Finally, one of the most important reasons why you should invest in email marketing is that it allows you the opportunity to genuinely get to know who your ideal target audience is. Although social media allows you unprecedented access to your audience, it doesn’t allow you to pinpoint the details about them like email can.
Email marketing allows brands to get to know their audience on a more in-depth level, thanks to the need for personalization. Email personalization is vital for several reasons, including:
- Personalized promotional mailings have a 29% higher unique open rate, as compared to non-personalized mailings. – Instapage
- Ninety-one percent of consumers stated that they’re more likely to shop with a brand that offers them personalized offers and product recommendations. – Accenture
- Ninety percent of U.S. consumers find marketing personalization appealing, to some extent. – Statista
- Sixty-three percent of consumers have stated that they’ll stop purchasing from a brand that doesn’t utilize personalization tactics. – Smart Insights
Email marketing allows you to implement personalization tactics that simply aren’t available on other digital marketing platforms. Thanks to email list segmentation and email preference centers, you can gather detailed information from your subscribers without coming off as invasive.
Once you start implementing email list segmentation based on the data you’ve collected, you can start sending the most relevant content to your readers—something they prioritize when it comes to choosing the brands they return to and suggest to others.
Wrap up
With so many digital channels worth exploring when working on your marketing strategy, it can be easy to overlook some of the best options. That’s why you’ll want to consider these five reasons to invest in email marketing:
- Generates the most ROI
- Consumers prefer email communication
- Mobile users frequently check their email
- Boosts your sales
- Allows you to get to know your audience better
Ready to get started? Then dive into our complete email marketing guide for beginners today.
