Taking a step into email marketing can be a tough decision for businesses, with costs, time, and resources involved. But did you know the benefits of email marketing actually outweigh the cons? In fact, 90% of businesses say email marketing is important to their company’s overall success and still remains a vital marketing channel in 2024. It doesn’t stop there though, by 2027, the worldwide email marketing market will be worth 17.9 billion dollars, up from 7.5 billion dollars in 2020.
So if you’re still considering whether email marketing is the right move, check out these 11 email marketing benefits and see why it should be a part of your strategy.
It’s Cost-Effective
Compared to most forms of marketing, running an email campaign is not only cheaper, but it also generates one of the highest ROIs. For example, email marketing statistics show that 18% of companies achieve email marketing ROI greater than $70 per $1 invested. With the current integrations of AI and drag-and-drop email builders, it takes no time at all to create an email. You still need someone to plan, create, and measure results, but it’s still a more cost-effective form of marketing than most.
For example, if you compare it to a video advertisement, you have to pay for the equipment or agency, the location, and the props, and that’s not even considering running and paying for the advertisements themselves. The same applies to traditional marketing methods that require an upfront cost.
Depending on the goals and structure of your organization, email marketing can belong to one employee or be outsourced to one freelancer. In some cases, it could even be an added task for a marketing manager. This, combined with the low investment costs, makes email marketing cost-efficient.
Communicate Directly With Your Audience
One of the many benefits of email marketing is being able to communicate with your audience. This is an audience that you have built organically, where every subscriber has made a choice to connect with your brand and receive email communications. This is much different from advertising and social media where you have to build that connection in the first place.
I am not talking about sending sales emails or email campaigns that benefit the brand either, although 61% of consumers prefer to be contacted by brands through email, this is about emails that benefit the subscribers – while at the same time doing wonders for brand awareness and credibility. If you think about it, would you rather get an email listing 30 products you will probably never buy, or an engaging story that feels personal from the brand?
Additionally, email marketing is much different in this aspect, where you don’t have one chance to connect – you have multiple. Every single email sent is a chance to connect on a different level, and it’s completely up to you how it’s done.
Allows For Targeted Marketing
Email platforms and tools have become so advanced lately, especially with AI, that you can run effective targeted email campaigns. Targeted marketing in email campaigns involves segmenting your audience based on factors such as demographics, interests, behavior, or purchase history. It allows you to tailor content to those specific subscribers, increasing the likelihood that they will open, click, or engage in some form.
Segmentation and personalization can have profound effects on your email marketing strategy. For example, segmented campaigns can result in a 760% increase in revenue and a 33% increase in customer lifetime value. Of course, you will have to understand segmentation and targeting, while also utilizing an email marketing tool to implement it. However, if done effectively, email campaigns that are segmented and well-targeted can generate a 77% return on investment (ROI).
Through targeted marketing, you can maximize the effectiveness of your email campaigns by delivering the right message to the right people at the right time, leading to improved engagement, higher conversion rates, and greater overall success.
You Can Personalize Communications
One of the primary benefits of email marketing is being able to personalize and even hyper-personalize your campaigns. Personalization is using information or data to tailor experiences or messages (in this case emails) to the preferences of an audience. Not only can you personalize emails though, combined with segmentation, you can personalize 10x to personalize to different cohorts of your audience.
In one survey, 80% of people stated they are more inclined to do business with an organization that delivers tailored experiences. Think about it this way, if you received 40+ emails a day with marketing nonsense but 1 of those emails used your name, which one would you be more inclined to engage with?
From a business perspective, companies that excel at personalization earn 40% more money than the average competitor. There aren’t many marketing channels that offer the levels of personalization that email marketing does. Not only should marketers be going above and beyond to personalize email campaigns – but it should be a standard practice for every marketer.
Increases Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is vital in the world of marketing and business. There are many factors involved in building a brand, and all require consistency, but one of the ways you can effectively build awareness for your brand is through email marketing. It doesn’t have to be about overdoing it on brand colors, images, logos, etc. but it’s about your audience recognizing your emails, trusting them, opening them, enjoying the content, and so on.
Once your audience recognizes your brand name – the brand that sends ‘really funny emails’ or ‘keeps us up to date’ – they will recall your brand more often, could engage in WOM advertising, and more than likely will open your emails more in the future. If you also consider the point about personalization before, this becomes a double benefit. In fact, according to a survey by Salesforce, 94% of marketers believe that personalized marketing has a positive effect on brand-building.
You can also use email to gather feedback on your brand and to understand any areas of improvement or opportunity.
Generates a Higher ROI
Email marketing remains one of the most powerful forms of marketing out there. When most subscriber lists are considered ‘warm’ audiences, you see where the high ROI comes from and why 30% of marketers cite email marketing as having the highest email marketing ROI. In fact, might be surprised to know that shoppers spend 138% more when marketed through email, as compared to those who do not receive email offers.
Generally, for every $1 spent on email marketing, $44 is made in return, which equals a 4400% ROI. (Campaign Monitor). When you combine the low cost to run vs the high levels of engagement, you can see why email marketing is so effective. It’s even 40x more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook and Twitter combined.
You Own The Audience
Although that doesn’t sound great – it’s true. When you build an email subscriber list, that belongs to you (or your brand). It might not seem like a big deal, but what if your email marketing platform stopped running? You can have the exported list saved and reuse it elsewhere. That’s not something you can do with social media, for example, if something happened and all the followers were lost, that’s it. They are gone forever.
You Can Automate
Marketers already struggle with the number of tasks they have to do these days. However, another top benefit of email marketing is automations – made even easier with AI. Of course, you still need to set up and configure the automation, but it still saves time. Not only does it save time, but it can also drive more revenue, for example, according to Campaign Monitor, 320% more revenue is driven from automated emails than non-automated emails.
There are many possibilities when it comes to setting up automation workflows;
- You can have a welcome series of emails go out on specific days – triggered when a new person subscribes.
- Use abandoned cart automations which send users an email reminding them that they didn’t checkout and purchase the items.
- Set up birthday emails to go out offering subscribers discounts or a free item on their birthday.
The great thing about email automation is it can be set up and left to run, requiring little maintenance.
Increases Website Traffic
Email marketing can drive engagement and depends on your CTA goals, which could include increasing traffic to your website. Let’s say you had a really important blog post informing users of your product of new changes and updates, sending this to your email list can bring in more users and encourage them to read it. Or perhaps you released a brand new product but it’s a bit slow off the ground, an email campaign could drive visitors to the product and increase sales.
One of my email marketing tips here would be to make sure the CTA or email benefits the subscriber. For example, don’t just write an email asking people to click through to your website to read something generic – benefiting you only. Instead, the copy of the email should explain why it’s important to the subscriber. The content should also be relevant to the subscriber. No one cares about business updates unless they relate to or impact the person reading.
Increases & Nurtures Leads
Email marketing can increase the number of leads you get, although not every subscriber will be a qualified lead. More often than not, this is done through lead magnets, which is usually something like a discount or free item given to a user in exchange for their email on a website. That user then enters into an automation workflow that would encourage them to take further action.
Not only is email marketing a great way to collect leads, but it’s also powerful at nurturing them, ready for conversions. Lead nurturing is maintaining effective communication with leads who aren’t ready to take action, keeping them warm until the time is right to move them onto the next stage – mostly purchasing. Email is the perfect channel for this, especially with automations and personalization.
Generates More Sales & Revenue
Generating more sales and revenue is another one of the key benefits of email marketing. 59% of people in a HubSpot survey stated that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions. From abandoned cart emails to featuring products directly in emails, many factors can contribute to the increase in sales. Discount codes are one of the most popular methods for increasing sales through email – which can be automated and included in abandoned cart emails.
You should never rely on email marketing as an only sales channel though, it should be combined with organic reach and paid advertising.
