7 Reasons Why Email Marketing Can Help Your Business Grow

How email marketing can help your business grow

The pace of innovation and number of resources available to marketers today is nothing short of incredible.

However, for ten years in a row, email has continued to be the category generating the highest ROI for marketers (source: venturebeat report). For every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI and gives marketers the broadest reach of all the channels available to them. Despite the plethora of tools available to marketers, email marketing is simply the best bet for business growth.

Reason 1: Email has larger reach

With the likes of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter dominating our lives online, it’s tempting to believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the masses. While they have an eye-watering number of followers, did you know that the total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and >4.9 billion in 2017, according to Radicati.

While this might seem surprising at first, think about your own online behaviour: When you sign up for a website (like an online store), you have to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account. What’s more, Facebook and Twitter use email to notify users of activity.

Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who is online has an active email address. So when it comes to connecting with your prospects and customers, there’s no channel with a wider reach than email.

Reason 2: Email marketing delivers your message

If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list, or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time, says Forrester Research.

There are two key reasons why:

First, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas 2% (at best) of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook limits the number of times your posts appear in the News Feed in an attempt to drive brands towards their paid advertising options. This is a big deal when it comes to getting your messages seen.

Secondly, your email subscribers have explicitly told you they want to hear from you when they signed up for your email list. There are strict laws and regulations around SPAM laws, so if you’re emailing a prospect or customer, it is because they gave you permission to. Now think about the ads in your Facebook News Feed – did you ask those companies to market to you? Probably not. More than likely, you performed a Google search or visited their website. That’s decidedly different than proactively signing up from an email newsletter.

Reason 3: Email drives conversions

Most marketers are laser-focused on driving conversions. Regardless of whether this is in the form of leads, sales, memberships, or a metric unique to your business strategy, the ultimate goal for marketers is to turn potential customers into paying customers.

And when it comes to conversions, there isn’t a more powerful channel than email.

In fact, the average click-through rate of an email campaign is around 3% (of total recipients), whereas the average click-through rate from a Facebook post or Tweet is around 0.5%.

What’s more, email is highly measurable with many of the popular email platforms giving users access to real-time access metrics like opens, clicks, bounces, forwards, social shares, and more.

Reason 4: Email marketing has a higher ROI

Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it would make sense that email is also the most effective marketing channel to drive ROI. Email marketing yields an average 3,800% return on investment for businesses and for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $38.

Unlike social networks where you send status updates to every follower regardless of their location, interests and purchase history, email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications. The more data you have about your customers in an email marketing tool – the more targeted you can be.

Reason 5: Email marketing is the preferred communication channel

For many, social networks are a very personal form of communication used to keep up to date with friends and family. When people log in to their social media accounts, they are there to see photos and updates from people they know and care about.

Email on the contrary, is a much more professional medium and people expect to receive information about products and services through that channel.

In fact, a study from MarketingSherpa studies show 72% people prefer to receive promotional content through email, compared to 17% who prefer social media.

Reason 6: Email is an open platform

Over the past few years, many brands have invested millions of dollars into buying large social followings in order to be able to communicate and engage with an audience.

But while businesses are investing in various social media platforms, Facebook has frequently updated its algorithm to reduce the amount of followers who will see a brand’s post, unless those posts are paid advertisements. This has become so prevalent that 98% of brand followers will never see the posts in their News Feeds. Facebook is not the only social media platform that has adopted this practice.

Email, on the other hand, isn’t owned or controlled by any one particular entity. It’s an open communication platform and there are a multitude of services that provide access to send and receive email. If you invest the time and money into building a great email list it’s an asset you will own and be able to leverage without the threat of someone limiting its effectiveness.

Reason 7: Email will be around forever

Remember MySpace? What? The once-hot site was the largest social networking site in the world between 2005 and 2008, and in June 2006 surpassed Google as the most visited website in the United States. Yet where is MySpace now? All those users eventually moved on to other social networks.

Email on the contrary has a long history of stability. The first promotional email campaign was sent in 1978 to a total of 400 people, and email has been growing consistently since. Interestingly, the email space itself has evolved from a time where you needed a developer to build an email, to today where many platforms exist to empower the modern marketer to create and send beautiful branded emails. This shift has put the power of business email into the hands of more people.

Building your email list, unlike building a social media following, is a stable long-term investment that will pay off for many years to come.

How can GDR help?

Today’s marketers need to do more with less. They need to connect with their audience in a highly personalised way, while staying on budget. Marketers that can do this – connect with their prospects and customers in a highly targeted way – will be successful in delivering ROI and revenue back to the business.

Whether you want to get better ROI on email marketing campaigns, or support help building automated emails to regularly engage your customers our email marketing services, delivered by an experienced, local team can help.

GDR has worked with businesses across Australia, and can deliver a tailored email marketing strategy for you.

We’d love to help!