Why email marketing still works today (2022)

Digital Marketing is continually evolving, and with the emergence of Social Media, Marketing Automation, Big Data, and Mobile Marketing, you might dismiss Email Marketing as an outdated channel. However, good old Email Marketing is still as relevant today as it was 20 years ago.

While more and more emails are ending up in a spam folder, it’s not because email as a marketing tool is ineffective, but because most email campaigns are poorly planned and executed.

Great emails are still finding their way to customers.

Social media is getting all the attention these days, but email marketing has many advantages over other digital channels – let’s start with the most apparent email marketing advantage.

You Own It!

The most valuable part of email marketing is the contact list; consequently, you can easily move from one email marketing platform to another. You cannot say the same for other channels, like social media.

For example, what is the most valuable part of Facebook? Connections. Can you easily move your Facebook connections to Twitter, LinkedIn, or TikTok? No. Therefore, you don’t own the most valuable piece of that channel/platform.

Your email contacts are an asset to your company – no matter which direction digital marketing, customers, or your industry goes into, you can still easily reach your customers with email. We cannot say the same with most other digital marketing channels.

Low-Cost

Compared to other marketing channels, Email Marketing is relatively inexpensive. How affordable is email marketing? If we take MailChimp (www.mailchimp.com) as an example, sending emails to 2,000 contacts is free. For most startups and small businesses, this is more than enough to start with. Even if you get into the 10,000+ contacts range, the cost is still very reasonable.

However, there are some associated costs that you will likely incur. For example, you may need to purchase (or shoot) photos for your email campaign.

High ROI

Email marketing often outperforms other marketing channels with regard to return on investment (ROI) because the cost per campaign is very low. Therefore, even modest success (e.g., increase in sales) can quickly cover expenses and generate a nice profit.

Note: When you calculate your email marketing ROI, make sure you include all costs—for example, a monthly fee for email marketing software, graphic design, content writing, etc.

Segmentation

The more information you have about your contacts, the more successful your email marketing campaign will be. Why? Because all successful email campaigns have one thing in common – they are timely and relevant, and only segmented contact lists produce timely and relevant emails.

Generic emails end up in a spam folder.

Here are several examples to get you thinking about segments. If your email list is not segmented at all, then start by segmenting your list with two or three segments—for example (3 segments), female living in Washington and interested in fitness.

Demographic segments

Age (e.g., 28 – 38)
Gender (e.g., Female)
Occupation (e.g., Professional)
Income (e.g., $60,000 – $90,000)
Education (e.g., College-educated)

Geographic segments

Country (e.g., USA)
State (e.g., Washington)
City (e.g., Seattle)
Zipcode (e.g., 98121)

Behavioral segments

Buyer readiness (e.g., Awareness phase)
Adoption status (e.g., Early adopter)
Benefits-sought (e.g., Convenience)
Usage rate (e.g., Heavy user)

Psychographics segments

Lifestyle (e.g., Fitness)
Values (e.g., Altruist)
Personality (e.g., Outgoing)
Social class (e.g., Upper-middle)

More is not always better with segmentation – creating too many small insignificant segments can worsen your email campaign.

Every segmented email list should be meaningfully different.

CTAs (call-to-action)

The effectiveness of your email campaign is closely linked to the effectiveness of your CTAs. Good CTAs alone can make your email campaign successful (profitable).

CTAs have one job and one job only, to get your contacts/leads/customers to take the next step. The next step can be to read more, signup for a service, contact your company, purchase a product, and so on.

Even if you have a great contact list, if you don’t get your CTAs right, you will struggle to make your email marketing successful.

Ease of Use

Most email marketing solutions are straightforward to use. From the beginning, these tools were designed with business people in mind, so managing subscriber lists, creating campaigns, and tracking performance (open, click-through, and conversion rates) can all be performed with relative ease and no training. In other words, you do not need to be tech-savvy to implement successful email marketing in your business.

Analytics Are Easy To Track

Tracking data (analytics) is extremely important because you can quickly detect if your email campaign is meeting your expectations or underperforming.

At a minimum, track your conversion rate, click-through rate, and bounce rate closely.

Summary

Most of us are bombarded with Spam, so it’s tempting to link bad Email Marketing with Email Marketing in general. Email marketing is still effective today because useful and relevant content always surfaces to the top.

Don’t spam your audience, keep refining your subscriber list, and always focus on quality (not quantity).