I’ve long exclaimed the powerful and cost effective features of email marketing – particularly for B2B messaging. Here is a post from a few years ago.
Yet, email marketing has been proclaimed by pundits as “old school” and “bound to quickly recede.” However, recent reports suggest that email continues to be a powerful tool for marketers. If anything, we are seeing improvements in results from email campaigns. Consider the following.
Marketers find huge value in email marketing
The Direct Marketing Association surveyed marketers on which vehicles brought the strongest returns – email was over 4 times higher than the alternatives.
Email users reach huge percentage of the population
Marketers pay premiums for television because of its wide reach (particularly major events like the Super Bowl). Email, like TV, has massive reach.
eMarketer estimates that there will be 240.1 million email users in the US in 2016, accounting for nearly 89.8% of internet users and 74.1% of the population. This number will grow to 258.9 million users in 2020.
Open rates hold strong – they get even better
Epsilon has been running surveys on email metrics for some time. They report that the trend in North America is that open rates are trending up – in fact, they are the highest they’ve been since 2010 (extending back beyond the periods on this chart).
Click-through-rates (CTRs), though, have not seen this same rise. Keep reading for a reason why we see this decrease.
More people than ever view emails on their phones
According to a recent IBM report, more people than ever (49%) view their emails on their phones. It is very easy to access email on our mobile devices – and perhaps this is why open rates continue to be strong.
However, if emails are not optimized for the small screens of phones, they will not be as effective in getting engagement (clicks) and the results marketers are looking for. Perhaps this explains the drop in CTRs.
All in all, email marketing continues to be a powerful (if not the most powerful) arrow in a marketer’s quiver. Embrace email marketing.
