Justifying Email Marketing in 2013 and Beyond

There’s been a lot of buzz about the inevitable demise of email marketing. Sure, email inboxes are crowded, and social media is playing an ever-increasing role in influencing consumers’ decisions. But the idea that email is a beat-up old dinosaur just isn’t true. Email remains one of the most profitable marketing channels today — and will remain so into the future. If you need some ammunition to justify email marketing in your company, here are the facts.

• An impressive 77% of online consumers prefer to get permission-based marketing messages via email versus any other marketing channel, according to a recent study by ExactTarget — The 2012 Channel Preference Survey. Direct mail came in second with only 9% preferring it, while 5% of respondents chose text messages, 4% Facebook, and 1% Twitter.
• This same ExactTarget study also showed that email drives consumer purchases more than any other marketing channel. When asked if they ever made a purchase as a result of a marketing message received through various channels, 66% of survey respondents said that they had purchased based on a promotional email, compared to 65% direct mail, 24% telephone, 20% Facebook, and 16% text messages.
• The Direct Marketing Association’s Response Rate 2012 Report showed that email has the highest return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing channels. The ROI for email is $28.50, for example, compared to just $7 for direct mail. (To quickly and easily determine the ROI for your email campaigns and find the best ways to improve future email-marketing efforts, check out FulcrumTech’s email ROI calculator — ROI Goalsetter®.)
• The technology marketing research firm The Radicati Group, Inc., predicts the number of email accounts will increase from about 2.9 billion in 2010 to over 3.8 billion in 2014. This compares to a current 1.1 billion Facebook users, 1.5 billion Twitter users, 175 million LinkedIn users, and more than 10 million Pinterest users.
• Email is still the top activity for mobile Internet users, accounting for 41.6% of U.S. mobile Internet time, according to a recent Nielson survey.
• According to the Forrester Research Email Marketing Forecast, 2011 to 2016, the amount spent on email marketing in the United States is predicted to increase from about $1.7 billion to nearly $2.5 billion in 2016. The use of email marketing is growing because it works.
  
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So, email remains among the most effective ways to deliver that message, if you want your marketing message read and acted upon by prospects and customers. To be clear, I absolutely believe that you should enhance your email strategies by coordinating campaigns with other channels, such as social media, mobile, advertising, direct mail, and search engine optimization (SEO). For example, find ways to integrate your email marketing with social media marketing and be sure you optimize your campaigns for mobile users. Plus, never stop testing your email campaigns (e.g., subject lines, calls to action, frequency) to ensure your marketing message is relevant to subscribers.

Need some help in using email marketing in the most effective way? Contact us or give us a call at 215-489-9336. We love helping companies succeed and grow!