email marketing making a comeback

Why Email Marketing Came Back from the Dead

Discover why email marketing has reemerged as a talked-about viable marketing tool that should be a part of any multi-channel marketing mix.

Just like the physical medium it replaced, terminal diagnoses, obituaries and eulogies for electronic mail have been sounded in thoughtless think pieces for many years. For a time, these observations seemed mildly prescient as activities like Tweeting and Facebooking threatened to overtake our online lives.

However, just like our physical mailboxes were never upended and scrapped, so too does the email inbox persist as an online fixation and habit, grafted perpetually to our daily routines for the foreseeable future. Email use never really went away, whether as a correspondence tool, a marketing tool or otherwise, but marketers are now talking about email again as if it is the latest new thing. Here’s why we think that is:

Email Marketing Still Gets Results

For a dead guy, email sure does get around! In fact, email seems to be doing more work than ever before. Entrepreneur notes that 193.3 billion emails are received a day, 108.7 billion of which are related to business.

While a lot of digital ink has been spilled about the decline of email, even more digital ink has been used by marketers to send out emails — with positive results. Twenty-seven percent of respondents in a recent survey reported having excellent ROI from their email campaigns, and 46% reported “good” ROI, while 5% were unsatisfied, according to CIO.

What kind of ROI are these emails delivering? If you believe the Direct Marketing Association, it is a mind-boggling 3800 %, offering back $38 for every dollar invested. That’s some serious coin and a strong indicator of email’s clean bill of health for the time being.

Email Marketing Complements a Multi-Channel Strategy

Practically no other medium can offer the level of personalization that email marketing can, making it an excellent complement to coax leads through to the next intended stage of the funnel. Marketing automation software can now reclaim lost prospects while maintaining a highly personalized, relevant appeal. “Using email, whether triggered through registration, a dropped basket, a behavioral or anniversary-related input, helps draw the consumer back into the consideration process and moves them forward on their journey,” says David Moth of eConsultancy.

Other email vectors can notify loyal readers of a new post or be used concurrently with social media campaigns to increase engagement. Aggregating short snippets of blog posts into a newsletter-style format, for instance, has become a popular method of condensing content into a more digestible form while promoting traffic to blog pages.

Among the most potent but least-discussed capabilities of email within a marketing mix is the healthy troves of data it can yield. A/B testing, engagement measurement and other processes all produce data ripe for analytics and subsequent insights. According to Forbes, 41% of marketers at successful enterprises use email data for their analytics processes — more than any other data source.

The Low Price of Immortality

Like a digital Highlander, email marketing could live on forever in one format or another, but all we can say is that right now email is enjoying a quiet resurgence thanks to its powerful and perhaps underestimated capabilities.

We make these observations not as cheerleaders for one channel over the other but merely to point out that underneath the hype of new channels like Mobile and Snapchat lies a taciturn, unsung laborer that should never be overlooked as a part of any multi-channel marketing campaign.

1 comment

Very interesting article. To be very honest, I never thought email would be overtaken by social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter. Fundamentally, email addresses have become almost as important as one’s own name. Nearly every type of account that I can think of (whether it be an ‘online’ social media account or leaving feedback comments at a restaurant, there’s an area to fill out one’s email address). So to me, email is at the root of it all and has become the gateway to everything else.

“Entrepreneur notes that 193.3 billion emails are received a day, 108.7 billion of which are related to business.” This leads me to wonder.. is the approach like shooting fish in a barrel, where there is guaranteed success but varied degrees of it? While the Direct Marketing Association boasts a staggering ROI of 3800% for emails, what are the actual cost involved? I’d be curious to see where on the scale emails are, with regards to cost.

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