Email has been part of a marketer’s toolkit for years.

And now some people believe that recent innovations have killed email marketing.

Yes, it makes sense because ordinarily new inventions tend to phase out older technologies.

But, is email marketing dead and buried?

Let’s find out.

Is Email Marketing Still Effective?

First, for email marketing to be successful, it has to be widely used. In this case, email is still popular. In fact, there are over 4 billion email users worldwide which is almost twice the number of YouTube users. 

That’s a huge demographic for marketers to target.

But, just because email is popular doesn’t mean that it’s still effective. The only way to find out is to consider the results from businesses that use it.

Let’s look at it in detail:

#1. 91% of marketers rated email as a key marketing channel to their organization. Social media came second at 83 percent.

#2. With an ROI of £42 for every pound spent, it beats all marketing channels. In other words, email marketing has an ROI potential of 4200%.

#3. 59% of consumers prefer email as a marketing channel.

#4. Email has an average open rate of about 23% and click-through rate of 3.71%. On the other hand, social media (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) has an average engagement rate of roughly 0.6%. This shows that emails reach most of the intended recipients.

#5. 73% of millennials prefer business communications to come via email.

#6. 78% of marketers have noticed an increase in email engagement over the last 12 months.

#7. 350 million dollars was spent on email advertising in the U.S in 2019.

#8. 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions.

#9. 81% of B2B marketers say that email newsletters are their most used form of content marketing.

#10. 80% of business executives believe that email marketing increases customer retention.

Please note:

People check different metrics to determine the success of email marketing. You can look at open rates, engagement or lead generation.

Also, sometimes email marketing fails to work because the email contents don’t match the interests of the recipients. In other cases, some companies bombard users with too many emails leading to people canceling their subscriptions.

So, what’s...

The Way Forward

Numbers never lie and as shown above, email marketing has evolved and still offers numerous advantages to companies. With a well-planned strategy and adherence to best practices then positive results will just be a matter of time.

Additionally, just because email marketing works doesn’t mean that every organization needs to implement it. You need to do your homework and see if it works for you.