Email Marketing: Is It Still Effective In 2020?

Email is one of the oldest marketing tools, yet it remains one of the most effective and relevant mediums today. While many professionals will argue that email marketing is on a down-slope as a result of the growth of social media marketing, the following statistics paint a different picture:

• Email generates $38 for every $1 spent, an astounding 3,800% ROI (Email Monday, 2015)
• 40% of B2B marketers report that email marketing is critical to the success of their content marketing strategy. (Content Marketing Institute, 2017)
• 73% of millennials prefer email communication from brands (Adestra, 2016)
• 99% of consumers check their email every day (DMA Insights, 2017)
• 80% of professionals interviewed believe that email marketing increases customer retention. (Emarsys, 2018)
• 59% of those interviewed say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions (SaleCycle, 2018)
• 59% of marketers report that email is their biggest ROI (Emma, 2018)

With a properly planned strategy, email campaigns can leverage sales, retain customers, and build brand loyalty. Adding email as part of a well-rounded strategy, that supports your overall marketing system, has many advantages.

Why is email marketing effective?

As with all marketing efforts, email is effective when it’s built with the right components and includes relevant, valuable content. One of the biggest advantages of email over any other form of marketing is the opportunity to create a more personalized and targeted approach to communicating with consumers. 

Another reason why email marketing is effective is the ability to analyze data within email marketing tools such as HubSpot. Any quality marketing strategy includes a method of measuring results and investigating what works and what doesn’t.  

With this data, companies are able to view successful email campaign metrics, look at open rates, click-through rates, and assess poor performing emails. With the ability to look at this data, companies can adjust their messaging, adapt to their audience and reiterating. 

How do I start a marketing email?

While email marketing is best known for promoting products or services, but it’s not limited to only this. Email marketing can also include newsletters, blog updates, or a nurture campaign used for businesses to keep their customers informed and to maintain client relationships. 

The first step in crafting an excellent marketing email is to decide what your marketing goals are and what communicative approach you want to take. There are a number of communication strategies to choose from including:

• Promotional (Products/Services): The most common form of email marketing used to advertise or announce a new product or service. Promotional emails are meant to be persuasive and typically include a call to action to encourage a purchase.

• Informational (Blogs/Newsletters): Intended to give clients value and knowledge about an event, course, service, or particular product. Or an educational series for example, 30 Days of Social. 

• Build Trust (Nurture Emails): These types of emails are used as a strategy to increase loyalty, retain customers by encouraging a relationship with the brand, or to nurture your cold and warm leads.  Loyalty emails usually feature client testimonials, informs customers of what the company is currently up to, and shares any organizations that the brand supports. Doing this builds rapport and makes customers feel like they are part of the story. Nurture emails are used to target your ideal audience and provide tips and value to help them in their business today and builds trust in establishing you as the leader.

How do I build an email list?

Some marketers believe that social media extinguishes the need for email marketing, however the two mediums can supplement one another in producing an effective strategy. 

While most marketing experts will teach you how to jump right into creating an attractive and persuasive email marketing campaign, this is not effective if you don’t have an audience to begin with. Even the best content is useless without anyone receiving it.

Lead magnets to build your email list and support your sales funnel

One of the best ways to build your email list is through lead magnets. Promoting free content, valuable resources, contests, or promotions on your social media, video marketing, and your website are all strong ways to entice your audience to sign up for your email list. 

Once added, new members will receive your automated nurture campaign that guides them through to your sales funnel or takes them to a direct call to action. 

Building your email list requires the full consent of each subscriber as per the GDPR and email marketing best practices. What this means for companies is that their subscribers are already engaged and interested in their offer. Unlike a cold audience on social media, your warm audience in your email list is more invested in your brand. Why waste your time trying to convince people to buy? Put your focus into finding people who are ready to buy from you and engage with your brand. 

The bottom line

In the year 2020, email marketing won’t be going away anytime soon. With a well-planned strategy and relevant content, your brand can benefit from using email as part of a strong marketing strategy.

You want to connect with your customers, we want to humanize marketing. Whether that’s to educate your audience, build trust with your potential customers, up-selling current customers, or creating special offers to delight your past customers, our team of inbound marketers at Chirp can help.