Email Continues to Carry the Digital Payload

Email Continues to Carry the Digital Payload

With so much focus being placed on all the shiny new toys in the digital marketing arsenal, it's often times easy to overlook the importance of the email channel.To helpput this in context, there's a host of statistics that really begin to underscore how essential it is to perfect your communications in this channel.These data points that will help underscore why email is the digital workhorse and will continue to be:

1. Email Provides a $44.25 Return on Every Investment Dollar

Imagine handing your stock broker a crisp one dollar bill and having him handed back more that $40 — that's an investment all of us would make without hesitation.

According to Forrester Research, for every dollar spent on email marketing, you will receive an estimated $44.25 return on investment.

The reason for such a high ROI is because email (done correctly) is permission based and helps keep businesses at the forefront of consumer mindset.It also provides an opportunity for follow-up re-targeting campaigns, which can lead to an increase in sales. Emails also increase referrals and build strong relationships with prospects and customers which helps to position your business as an authority.

2. Email Is a Main Sales Driver for Black Friday

In 2016, e-commerce hit record breaking numbers on Black Friday and email marketing was one of the main sales drivers, according to an Adobe news report.

Email drove more than 17% of sales and outranked display ads and social media. Despite the enormous popularity of social media, sales through those channels accounted for just .9% of sales.

On the most important (and profitable) shopping day of the year, customers used email promotions to decide how, when, and where to shop.

3. Over 2.5 Billion People Use Email & Usage Is On the Rise

Despite predictions of its demise, consumers are using email more than ever before.

According to a study by the Radicati Group, by the end of 2020 the number of email users will top 3 billion people, meaning more than half of the world's population will be using email. Gmail alone had 1 billion worldwide users in 2016, according to a report from Statista. Across generations, the lure of a new email is often too great to resist. People are checking their email from bed, while driving, and even from the bathroom.

As a result of on-the-go email, the key to succeeding with these consumers is to make sure your emails are mobile friendly.If you need some motivation to insure that your email programs are mobile optimized then consider that more than 55% of emails are opened using a mobile device, and for millennials that number can be as high as 88%. Therefore, if your emails are not optimized for mobile use, then 55-88% of your audience will struggle to read them, or worse, decide to opt out from receiving any future emails.

4. 77% of Your Consumers Prefer Email

For business to customer communications, not only is email not dying, but consumers actually prefer it. Salesforce Marketing Cloud noted that email popularity may be dropping for personal communications, but for business purposes, a mind-blowing 77 percent of customers prefer marketing communications to come through email, while only 5 percent choose text messaging and 6 percent select social media.

Clearly, email is established in consumers' minds as the best way to hear from companies, and that trend is only growing. While it is appropriate for businesses to offer customers a choice, email shows every sign of remaining on top for the foreseeable future.

5. 70% Consumers Redeem Email Promotions

In a recent study on email marketing that was released by Salesforce Marketing Cloud, they noted that 7 out of 10 people actually used a promo code or discount that they received in their email. Consumers love discounts, they love feeling like they are part of an exclusive club, and they love to receive promotional emails from companies they trust. Remember, if they chose to give you their email address, they want to hear from you!

6. Consumers Spend 138% More When They Receive Email

The great part about 70% of consumers using email promos, is that they also tend to spend more than those who don't.Convince & Convert recently released email statistics from the Marketing Profs Digital Marketing Mixer panel discussion on email marketing. The panel noted that on average, people who make a purchase through an email marketing promotion spend 138% more than shoppers who did not receive the email.

Think about that for a moment…If you have two people visit your e-commerce site, and one received an email while the other did not, the person who got the email will statistically spend $238 for every $100 that the email-less shopper spends.

That translates into a lot of money you are leaving on the table if you choose not to use email marketing.

7. Email Is 40x More Effective at Driving Sales

Despite the growing social media hype, email is a whopping 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in driving new sales.

According to McKinsey & Company, email marketing remains the second biggest way to acquire new customers, after organic search. Combine this with the tendency for email customers to spend more, and it is easy to see that email marketing is a must-have for any business.

8. Email Is the Most Popular Online Activity

The same fact that leads critics to claim that email is dead may actually be what proves that it is alive.

According to a 2016 report by Ciceron, email remains the single most popular online activity, with 94% participation. Social media algorithms make it increasingly difficult to determine how many of your followers actually see your posts whereas emails are correctly delivered 90% of the time.Customers like to receive emails from trusted companies, and will generally open them. With so many permission-based eyeballs on your message, how could you afford to give up email marketing?

9. Email Ranks as the #1 Tactic for Building Customer Awareness, Acquisition, Conversion, and Retention

In a 2014 study by Gigaom Research, marketers consistently ranked email as their number one tactic for building customer awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention.

However, where email really stands out is in customer retention. Building trust, nurturing relationships, and educating the consumer are what email does best.No other marketing tactic provides that sense of one-on-one communication without feeling invasive as successfully as email marketing.

Take Your Email Marketing to the Next Level Today…

As you can see from the stats above, if you're NOT using email marketing in your business, then you're missing out on an extremely valuable opportunity to market your business. But, assuming you are using email then know that it is important to continue progressing these programs and driving even greater success.Make no mistake about it, consumers' expectations have been lifted and they have limited patience for "batch and blast" programs that they don't consider relevant.If you aren't already doing it, it's time to consider how you might better utilize data to personalize your email content and offers so that they in turn drive higher engagement and ROI.We are happy to do a metric focused evaluation of your email programs and make suggestions on how you can push the needle forward and drive even greater ROI from this key medium.