Is email dead? Replace by social media and conversational platforms when it comes to personal conversations between friends and family, yes. But email marketing campaigns between businesses and customers or prospects are alive and well. In fact, according to Adobe’s 2017 Email Use Report , over 60% of consumers (especially those age 25 and over) prefer when brands contact them via email.
Today, email serves as the primary digital ID in the customer journey. As new privacy regulations and tech platform policies make it increasingly difficult to target consumers with paid media, the primacy of primary data assets is clear – and email addresses are at the top of the list.
As new marketing channels gain popularity and email marketing strategies evolve, there are many misconceptions about their importance and effectiveness. In this article, we’ll debunk the most common myths to explain why email marketing is essential for small, medium, and large businesses .
Email Marketing Myths
Myth 1: Email marketing is archaic and not as effective as other marketing channels.
While some expecte contextual targeting on social meia to be its demise, email has held on and persiste. Why? Because email is the primary reference point for consumers in the digital world.
Fact: Several factors make email more relevant than ever for marketers:
- The boom in email commerce
- The priority of primary data acquisition
- Stricter regulatory requirements
These conditions have help change marketers’ sentiment toward email marketing programs. While email has been around for decades, the way it’s use has evolve, and the best marketers are those who have adapte their strategies to better meet today’s standards. Businesses rely heavily on email to guide consumers through the various stages of the buying journey, including product discovery, the transaction itself, purchase confirmation, and order status.
Nearly 73% of marketers surveye in Q4 2020 (CMO Council) cite email as the top channel among a long list of communication channels, including social media, web forms, online reviews and personal interactions with sales and customer service staff.
Myth 2: Social media and other marketing mix tactics generate more leads than email marketing programs.
While Facebook and Google ads, organic search engine optimization (SEO) practices, webinars, and other tactics can be effective in attracting new leads to your business, their usefulness in nurturing and converting is more limite.
Fact: Email generates sales and creates long-term purchasing relationships.
Ads can’t be use to convert leads into customers, track customer satisfaction, or upsell. Without this type of tracking throughout the customer journey, you’re left with a long list of leads, not a true marketing program that drives sales, builds lasting customer relationships, or generates new revenue.
Email is what brings your prospects to your website, where you convert. Email is where you offer incentives, share your latest content updates or news.
Myth 3: Consumers are inundate with emails and don’t want to receive any more.
It’s true that people get a lot of emails, but that doesn’t mean they’re junk. When was the last time you saw a junk message in your inbox? Email service filters have gotten so smart that chances are the emails in your inbox are emails you’ve subscribe to at some point.
Fact: Email is the preferre method of communication for most consumers.
When a consumer subscribes to your mailing list, they are giving you permission to access their inbox; they are telling you that they are intereste in your business and are ready to hear from you. The idea that your contacts don’t want you to send them emails is completely false. If they didn’t want your emails, they wouldn’t have signe up for your mailing list.
- According to DMA’s 2021 Consumer Email Tracker report , 96% of consumers check their email every day.
- In Canada, nearly 9 in 10 people age 15 and over reporte using email in the past three months, making it the top digital activity in the country according to a survey conducte by Statistics Canada in March 2021.
Email is also much less intrusive than many other forms of marketing. Consumers choose to check their email on their own schedule, and they can choose whether or not to open the message—unlike tactics like pop-up ads, which disrupt a person’s online experience, or even social media ads, which intrude on their personal newsfee. When consumers give you their email address, they expect you to respect their time and their inbox. A good rule of thumb is to only send emails if you offer value and your goal is clear. Also, make sure to write emails that are so compelling that people will be eager to open them!
Myth 4: Businesses have little control over email marketing.
According to a study conducte by eMarketer ( Canada Email Commerce 2021 ), two trends are emerging in 2021:
- Businesses looking to personalize email communications will look to targeting and segmenting lists base not only on purchase history (a metric that has been use for years), but also on digital behaviors, interests, and demographics.
- Privacy reform is underway in Canada and could affect marketers’ initiatives as early as next year. The propose changes will bring digital communication rules more in line with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). That could actually be a good thing for email. Remember: Canada’s anti-spam legislation (CASL) has significantly improve email performance since it came into effect in 2014.
Fact: Businesses have more control over email than any other channel.
Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have made numerous changes to their algorithms. These platforms determine how often and to whom your ads are shown, and they don’t seem to be stopping. The main goal of social networks is to limit the ability for users to leave their ecosystem.
Your email list is yours
You can control when emails are sent – down to the day and hour – and designate who specifically receives certain emails. In fact, 90% of emails reach a consumer’s inbox, but only 2% of Facebook followers see a business’s posts in their News Feed.
“People use to say that social media was going to kill email,” says Jean-François Renaud, co-founder of Adviso. “But email remains the 1 channel for driving campaign results and ROI.” In retail, as well as other industries where direct-to-consumer (D2C) is now the norm, email is the primary vehicle for engagement and is define as the driving force behind secondary purchases. Brands use email for everything from customer acquisition to re-engagement following cart abandonment, upselling, cross-selling, and retargeting. In addition to these downstream actions, many brands use email to broadcast brand messaging and build awareness. Email is a great way for brands to stay relevant to their customers.
Myth 5: Email marketing is expensive.
Fact: Email marketing generates a better ROI than any other marketing channel.
When done correctly, email marketing can have a higher ROI than other direct marketing channels. A recent study by Litmus shows that for every dollar spent on email marketing, you can estimate a return of about $36. The report also analyze email marketing ROI by industry:
- Software and technology: 40:1
- Marketing, public relations and advertising agencies: 42:1
- Retail, trade and consumer goods or services: 45:1
- Media, publishing, events, sports and entertainment: 45:1
- Travel, tourism and hospitality: 53:1
It’s clear that email marketing meets (and even exceeds) its average ROI of 42:1 when viewe through the lens of specific industries.
Myth 6: I learn a lot more about customers from their social media profiles.
Fact: Email lets you know people better than other channels.
When you sign up for Facebook, another social media platform, or even an app or website, you typically use your email address to create your account. This means that all the data these channels have about you is tie to your email address.
The marketing mix revolves around email. The identity of your customers and prospects follows them everywhere on the web, and email is at the heart of this targeting journey.
In other words, the custom audiences you create on Facebook to ensure you show your ads to people in your target market are only possible because Facebook tracks users’ web browsing history and links that data to individual people base on their email address.
Email addresses are the basic unit
They are also more reliable than other forms of identification such as using third-party browser cookie data to track visitors. Cookies can be delete or blocke, and you cannot compile cookies from different devices such as personal computers, tablets, and smartphones. Email addresses, on the other hand, consolidate traffic across devices.
Marketing automation treats email as the basic unit of analysis, regardless of the platform you use to target your audience. Plus, consumers keep their email addresses for years, which means your email database will have a long and reliable lifespan, no matter what channels you use for your marketing efforts.
Myth 7: Email isn’t as targete as other channels.
Fact: Emails can be hyper-segmente and personalize with the right marketing automation and CRM platform.
In email marketing, the old mass “ batch and blast ” approach is no longer relevant. Today, what is call “ spamming ” has been replace by kuwait email list extremely sophisticate possibilities of personalizing emails for each individual in your contact list.
With email, you can be much more targete and personal than with other channels. If your email automation platform is integrate with your CRM, you have a wealth of data on all your contacts: the products and services they’re intereste in or have purchase, the web pages they’ve visite, the ads they’ve click on, and their demographics. All of this information can be use to ensure you’re sending the right message to the right person at the right time.
In short, why is email marketing essential for business growth?
There is no doubt that email is not only a fundamental necessity for marketing and growth, but also a driver of results far beyond the capabilities working with databases in loginom of any other channel.
As we approach the end of 2021, a year marke by economic recovery, it’s unclear whether marketers are ready for a world without third-party cookies, as they’ve been preoccupie with reclaiming their leads post-COVID-19.
“In a world without third-party cookies, you end up having to use additional data sets to compensate for the lack of ability to digitally track the consumer,” says Roger Kamena, VP of Analytics and Data Science at Adviso.
Paid media has been a key part of this c phone number recovery, but when the world without third-party cookies begins, you won’t be able to track the return on that spend with the same effectiveness. We strongly suggest starting now to reinvest in primary data programs, especially email campaigns. We believe companies need to couple external datasets with email, text, and geospatial data to become more surgical in how they identify and engage consumers.
