Email marketing has become one of the leading strategies for companies worldwide. From 32.8% in 2018, the percentage of brands that report email marketing is critical to their success has grown to 41.5%, according to a report by Litmus in 2021. If you are part of the remaining 58.5% that have yet to yes to this statement, you may be wondering, what are the benefits of email marketing anyway? Should you start investing or put more money into this endeavor? Today, more than one-third of brands will increase their email marketing budgets. Should you follow this trend?
It is important to conduct thorough research and examine statistical data to understand the real advantages of email marketing. We wrote this article to simplify that process for you. We’ve sourced and reviewed recent email marketing reports and studies and concluded that there are 10 reasons why you should invest in email marketing. Toward the end of this article, you will also find a list of email marketing software solutions that you can leverage for automation, segmentation, personalization, and more.
Email Marketing Benefits and Advantages Table of Contents
Email continues to have a huge impact on the marketing landscape. In a recent survey, it is listed as the most effective marketing channel, with 79% of marketers putting it in their top three. In another study, 38% of marketers also said the effectiveness of their email marketing strategy has improved in the past year, while has held steady for another 39%.
Source: Validity, 2021
What’s surprising is that despite the evidence of email marketing’s effectiveness, only 58.33% have reported having an email marketing strategy in place according to Liana Technologies’ State of Email Marketing report. There are also still conversations going around about email marketing being dead. In the next sections, you’ll learn that the opposite is true. Email marketing is very much alive. And, companies that are not aware of the benefits of email marketing are definitely missing out.
Benefits and Advantages of Email Marketing
1. Low Cost, High Return
Email has an astounding ROI of 3,600%, that is, $36 for every $1 spent, on average. This makes it one of the most powerful marketing tools at your disposal today.
When used strategically, you can generate even higher ROIs with email. For instance, research shows that by leveraging analytics tools, you can generate an ROI of 45:1 or 4,500%. In the same way, you can generate a higher ROI when you send 9-16 emails per month (46:1), run A/B tests often (42:1), and use live content (57:1).
What’s more, email marketing only takes a small fraction of your marketing budget. Most midsize businesses spend $1,000 or less on email marketing per month, with some spending as low as $9. This only shows that most organizations, possibly including yours, would have no good excuse for not adopting an email marketing strategy.
Even without in-house experts, you can still benefit from email marketing by partnering with an agency. According to WebFX, $300 to $500 per month should be enough in this case. In theory, you’ll get $10,800 to $18,000 per month in return for this money.
Source: Litmus, 2021
2. Anticipated Communication
Another great thing about email marketing is that you can design it around the idea of consent. You can get implicit or explicit permission from your target audience to include them in your email list. In this way, you can make sure that the people you are sending emails to actually want to receive them. That you are not wasting their time or yours.
You get the implicit permission of your customers when you offer them freebies such as ebooks, whitepapers, free trials, or discounts. In exchange for these values, you can get their contact details and add them to your email list.
Even better, it gives you an opportunity to get their explicit permission. This means you have disclosed your intention to send them transactional or promotional emails and they opted in. Make sure you also give them the option to unsubscribe anytime.
By operating on the principles of permission-based email marketing, you can increase your deliverability, open, and click-through rates. You can also demonstrate your respect for your customers’ time and privacy and build a trusting relationship with them.
3. Targeted and Personalized Messages
Among email marketers, customer communication is the number one goal. However, if you want to be one step ahead of your competitors, you would want to do more than just simply communicate. You would want to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time.
To do this, you need to define and gather information about your target audience. Once you have this information, you can segment your email list. Note that the majority of marketers (60%) are creating content for at least three segments.
Apart from segmentation, you can also apply personalization techniques that work based on research to further strengthen your marketing campaign. Some of the most effective ones, according to a recent report by Litmus, include the use of dynamic content, animated GIFs, and live content. You can also use popular personalization factors such as name, past interactions, location, and past purchases.
Source: Litmus, 2021
4. Real-Time Engagement
With email marketing, you can reach an audience that already has an interest in your products and services. This is especially true if you have grown your email list organically instead of just purchasing it and sending unsolicited emails. When you have the permission of your target audience, they anticipate your messages and are more engaged.
You’ll have a good head start with email marketing as you already have an engaged audience. The next thing you can do is to engage them in real-time with triggered emails. Once they perform a specific action, you can send them an email with related content.
You may be familiar with the concept of triggered email marketing as this is a very popular tactic that you may have experienced yourself. You may have signed up for a product or service before and received a welcome email. Or, you may have left a product in your cart and received an email reminding you to buy that product.
What makes triggered emails possible is marketing automation. A marketing automation software empowers you to engage your customers in real-time. It can automatically send emails based on specific triggers. Some of the most popular email types that are being automated are welcome emails (83%), onboarding or post-purchase emails (68%), and subscriber re-engagement emails (40%).
5. Shareable, High-Value Content
Email is a great place for creating conversations with your customers. Here, you can provide them with resources relevant to your business. Even if they’re not yet a paying customer, you can engage with them and give them a reason to be interested in what you have to offer.
By combining high-value content and an effective email marketing strategy, you can convert your customers into your most effective marketers. If customers find your content to be relevant and of high value, there is a higher chance of them sharing it with their network.
Forwarding emails is easy but making people do it is a lot harder. You have to conduct a thorough investigation and analysis of consumer behavior statistics and content marketing trends in order to understand what ticks your audience.
Make sure to include social media share buttons on your emails so your readers can post about your content on various platforms. Also, keep in mind that, according to email marketing statistics, mobile devices account for 41.9% of all opened emails. You should optimize accordingly.
6. More Leads, More Sales, More Conversions
Lead generation statistics show that email is the channel that produces the highest ROI for B2B marketers. At the same time, email marketing is the most valuable technique for lead nurturing.
Email can help you qualify leads so you can focus on high-value customers that are more likely to make a purchase. It can also increase your sales as you can offer discounts, remind customers of abandoned carts, and feature your products and services through email.
By implementing the best practices and strategies for email marketing, you are also helping your sales team get more quality leads, and thereby, get more customers to buy your products or avail of your services. Email can be your gateway to achieving the goal of every business, which is to profit.
If you want to make the difficult task of converting leads into paying customers somewhat easier and more manageable, you can leverage email marketing software for lead generation.
7. Positive SEO Impact
When you combine email marketing efforts with your other search engine optimization (SEO) efforts, you will have better chances of ranking higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). In turn, your brand will have greater visibility and will also be able to establish itself as an authority in its field.
One way you can combine email marketing and SEO is by writing email content that directs your readers to your website. Because they already know the content and have expressed interest by clicking the link, chances are they are going to stay longer on your website and you will have a lower bounce rate.
Another tactic you can implement is adding social share buttons to your email. As discussed earlier, this can make your content more shareable. In this way, your email marketing efforts are also supporting your other digital marketing efforts. More social engagement also positively impacts SERP rankings.
8. Enhanced Market Research
Most marketers rely on secondary research when creating marketing decisions. They can look for instance at digital marketing statistics to have a good grasp of what other marketers are doing, which strategies are the most effective, and so on. So long as you are looking at reliable sources, secondary research can bring you success, too. But, if you really want to up your game, you can conduct first-hand research by leveraging email.
Email can serve as your research tool, and email marketing is your way to get people to participate in your study. You can use email to disseminate surveys and questionnaires. The results of such research endeavors are especially useful when you are in the process of segmenting your email list or creating buyer personas.
First-hand data can help you craft more successful marketing campaigns. It can help you get to know your audience better—their pain points, solution preferences, and perceptions about your product, among others.
Further, once you are through with your market research, you can publish the results in the form of whitepapers or ebooks. You can then use these as lead magnets and grow your audience base.
9. Highly Scalable
Over half of the world’s population is using email, and the number is only projected to grow as more people gain access to technology. You can only imagine the marketing possibilities that come with access to that many consumers.
Email marketing is scalable, which makes it perfect for businesses of every size. You don’t need to be an established enterprise to reach qualified leads with email. Your email list can grow as your business grows.
You can reach an audience of millions or just a segment list that includes a hundred. You can choose to target a global audience or localize your email content. There are virtually no boundaries in terms of reachability or limits as to the number of emails you can send, although of course there are useful guidelines out there for optimization.
10. Easy to Test, Measure, and Implement
You don’t need to have a large team in order to lay down and implement an effective email marketing strategy. In fact, only 8% of organizations have a dedicated team for email marketing. For the majority, email marketing is either a shared responsibility among employees (37%) or the sole responsibility of the marketing manager (19%) or content specialist (17%).
Of course, ideally, you would have a dedicated team. Remember, however, that more manpower does not necessarily translate into a successful email marketing campaign. What will surely work is having at least one person who has the technical expertise and can strategize based on email marketing trends and statistics.
By being up to date and looking at the numbers, you can never go wrong with email marketing. There are available data that tells you the ideal length of an email, the number of times you should send one, and even the optimal schedules. There are also clear metrics or KPIs that you can track and measure to know if your campaigns are performing well. These include open rate, click-through rate, click-to-open rate, unsubscribe rate, and bounce rate. You can also look at the studies that indicate the benchmarks for these metrics.
Average Email Benchmarks
Source: Liana Technologies, 2021
Designed byExamples of Email Marketing Software
Freshmarketer
Freshmarketer, a product of Freshworks, is a marketing automation software that can help businesses attract more leads and convert them into paying customers. With Freshworks, you can perform audience segmentation and create campaigns that are tailored to specific audiences. The software allows you to get insights into customer behavior, craft personalized and contextualized messages, and nurture customer relationships —all with minimal manual effort.
HubSpot Marketing
HubSpot Marketing is a comprehensive marketing software solution that empowers users with easy-to-use and top-of-the-line features. You can use this software to build visually appealing websites, prepare and optimize SEO blog posts, track and manage social media platforms and ads, run bots to communicate with your customers in real-time, and generally grow your audience base. It also comes with marketing analytics and reporting tools that can help you make data-driven decisions.
Maropost Marketing Cloud
Maropost Marketing Cloud is a web-based platform with automation features that can support your marketing efforts across various channels. It allows you to create targeted and personalized email campaigns, improve deliverability rates with its spam checker, and track if and when your emails are opened. Other than email, you can also manage your campaigns on the web, SMS, and social media using Maropost.
MailerLite
MailerLite is a comprehensive platform that has everything you need for email campaign creation and management. You can jumpstart your email marketing campaigns by using professionally-designed templates with this software. It also has three email editors that you can use to define and refine the look and feel of your newsletters. Further, the software also allows you to manage email lists, send emails based on triggers, and monitor the results of your campaigns.
vcita
vcita is a marketing software that also has features to cater to business management functions such as scheduling, online payments, and client management. The software simplifies the process of creating mobile-friendly campaigns by providing built-in templates. It also allows you to segment your list and personalize your email messages with the client’s first name.
What Are the Key Metrics to Track in Email Marketing?
Tracking the right metrics is essential for measuring and improving email marketing effectiveness. Here are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that matter most:
- Open Rate: This indicates the percentage of recipients who opened your email. A high open rate shows effective subject lines and good timing, while a low rate suggests your emails may not be enticing enough.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): This metric shows how many recipients clicked on a link within your email, revealing how engaging your content is. A higher CTR typically means the content resonates well with your audience.
- Conversion Rate: The conversion rate measures how many users took a desired action, such as purchasing or signing up for an event. It’s a critical indicator of email campaign effectiveness in driving business goals.
- Bounce Rate: This represents the percentage of emails that could not be delivered. A high bounce rate can indicate issues with your email list quality or server configurations.
- Unsubscribe Rate: Tracking the number of people who opt out of your emails helps identify whether the content is relevant or if the frequency needs adjusting.
- Spam Complaint Rate: High complaint rates indicate recipients find your emails too aggressive or irrelevant. Keeping this rate low protects your sender reputation.
Gain the Benefits of Email Marketing
The most obvious benefit of email marketing is its ROI. However, as we learned in this article, there is so much more to it than that. Email marketing is easy to test, measure, and implement, so there are not many hurdles for companies that want to start investing in it. By leveraging leading email marketing systems, companies also have the chance to humanize their interactions with their customers. They can also send high-value content and turn their customers into their most effective marketers.
If you want to learn more about email marketing, you can read our article on what the top email marketing software companies have to say about it.
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This was a great read! The growth in email marketing's importance really stood out, and it's clear that more brands are seeing its long-term value. I appreciate how you backed up the benefits with real stats and made the case for investing in it stronger. Excited to check out the tools you listed too—automation and personalization are total game-changers!
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