Email marketing is no longer an optional aspect of any successful marketing strategy. Email is an affordable and effective customer engagement channel used by businesses to drive sales, increase brand awareness and build customer loyalty.
The key benefits of this vital marketing channel are something you need to understand regardless if you’re just starting out or trying to enhance your current email campaigns.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore the top 5 reasons why email marketing deserves a place in your overall content and digital marketing mix. Let’s dive in!
1. Provides the Highest ROI
One of the biggest appeals of email marketing is its high return on investment (ROI) compared to other marketing channels.
The Direct Marketing Association claims that email marketing returns $42 for every $1 spent, a far greater ROI than other digital marketing platforms.
For context, here are the average returns from other major channels:
- Social media marketing: $5 ROI for every $1 spent
- SEO: $5 ROI for every $1 spent
- Paid search marketing: $8 ROI for every $1 spent
With email delivering between 4x to 8x higher returns, it’s easy to see why it should be a key part of your digital marketing allocation.
Beyond the baseline metrics, properly executed campaigns with email marketing API provide compounding email marketing benefits over time. As your list grows, and segmentation and targeting efforts improve, that initial investment will continue paying dividends.
2. Builds Direct Relationships
Email marketing helps you send direct messages to your subscribers without any middlemen. It empowers you to build more meaningful relationships than other channels.
Changes to your algorithm on a social media platform can limit your organic reach. And paid ads don’t have that critical personal touch. With email, however, the people who opt-in want to hear directly from you. Over time, the direct line of communication breeds trust and loyalty.
Good email copywriting also does not sell hard to subscribers but provides real value. They’ll be more receptive to your offers once you’ve built authority and goodwill.
3. Drives More Traffic
Well-crafted email campaigns can become a vital source of website traffic and bring new leads for your business.
Calls-to-action within your emails give readers a direct path to your site or landing pages. This allows you to prioritize key pages and offers to boost specific conversions. For example, promoting a lead magnet in an email sends targeted traffic to your landing page to generate new, qualified leads.
Driving cold traffic to your website can be expensive and inefficient. Email marketing gives you direct access to warm leads who are already familiar with your brand, so they’ll convert at much higher rates.
4. Measures Real-Time Performance
One of the biggest advantages of email marketing campaigns is you can obtain detailed analytics on all of your messages.
Email providers provide you with instant access to key campaign metrics such as open rates, click rates, conversions, shares and more.
These performance indicators help you refine and optimize your email approach in order to continually improve results. You can easily determine your top-performing messages in terms of engagement and ROI.
And even if a campaign misses the mark, the data will reveal exactly where it underperformed. This enables you to pinpoint areas needing improvement rather than guessing why it didn’t hit the target.
5. Delivers Personalization
Personalization is one of the biggest email marketing advantages, and it’s a capability that you can do at scale.
While it’s more work, the payoff in performance makes it worth it. Personalized emails are up to 6 times more likely to result in transactions and 29% more likely to result in unique open rates.
Of course, you can use merge tags to dynamically insert names, locations, purchases, and other custom details in each message. This is a good place to start, but personalization does not boil down to that only.
Get beyond one to one personalization and create highly targeted segments. Use subscriber details and behavior to segment your list and send relevant content. For example, send region specific promotions, or trigger sequences based on behaviors and attributes.
The more relevance each subscriber sees, the higher your engagement and conversion rates will climb.
Email Marketing Delivers Across Key Business Goals
Now that we’ve covered the main benefits let’s examine how these advantages translate into achieving core business objectives.
Driving Sales Revenue
At its foundation, the benefit of email marketing is that it serves as a vital sales channel to promote products, services, and offers.
Tactics like promotional messaging, cross-sells, upsells, and more directly boost online and in-store revenue.
According to Statista, 21% of email subscribers made a purchase directly through email. And email drives another 62% of recipients to the company’s website. So, collectively, 83% of sales interactions involve email as an essential catalyst.
On average, ROI from email captures is 208% higher than other marketing channels. With email’s wide reach, segmentation abilities, and performance tracking, it’s perfectly positioned to drive sales.
Generating Qualified Leads
Beyond e-commerce sales, email marketing also excels at generating new qualified leads.
Calls-to-action to download lead magnets in exchange for contact details helps continually grow your subscriber list. You can also use exit intent pop-ups on key pages to capture visitors that show buying signals.
Welcome sequences and lead nurturing workflows lead prospects through the sales funnel and become marketing-qualified leads. They also help sales teams focus on closing hot, sales-ready leads.
Email acts as the engine that drives your entire lead generation process, as it is the center of capturing and nurturing leads.
Building Brand Awareness
While email marketing focuses heavily on direct-response campaigns, it also raises brand awareness and shapes perception.
In fact, 72% of customers say email cultivation from brands makes them feel more positive towards that company.
Always send continuing emails with value, and show your subject matter expertise and willingness to help your customers. Over time, it builds trust and loyalty.
You also can promote brand-building content offers by email, such as educational materials and community access. And as they consume this content, your brand’s awareness and affinity grow with them.
In the end, the advantage of email marketing gives you the chance to create and iterate your brand story over and over again and explain why customers should value your company.
Increasing Customer Retention
Improving customer retention and loyalty also depends on email. The key to stopping churn and keeping customers engaged is recurring communication.
- Post-purchase follow-ups are for support and educational resources to help the buyers use the product and service fully.
- Special loyalty programs promoted by email give VIP perks and early access to new arrivals for your best customers.
- Lifecycle messaging delivers incentives, new use cases, and added value to existing customers so they stick around longer.
Brands with welcome programs enjoy 3x higher revenue per email compared to those without. Clearly, onboarding and retention emails generate significant upside.
Generating Referrals & Social Sharing
Email allows brands to take advantage of already existing customers to refer products and share them on their social networks.
Announcement emails of referral programs notify subscribers of such special incentives or perks for participating. It captures first interest and interest in the opportunity to earn rewards. You can even add social sharing buttons directly to your broadcast emails. Using simple one-click tools, you can share your content with readers via all major platforms.
To maximize visibility, send a dedicated “Share This” email showcasing your most compelling social media content.
This branded content gets more eyeballs on your updates and offers while readers share your message with their networks.
Key Email Marketing Trends To Adopt
Now that you know the major benefits of email marketing campaigns, let’s examine some of the top email marketing trends and best practices you should adopt for maximum success.
Personalization At Scale
The ability to personalize emails is nothing new. However, leveraging data and automation to customize at scale efficiently takes things to another level.
- Segment contacts based on attributes and behaviors for targeted messaging.
- Use merge tags to dynamically insert subscriber names, locations, past purchases, etc.
- Set up conditional content blocks to serve up tailored information.
- Build automated sequences around the subscriber lifecycle stage.
With personalization, every subscriber feels you’re speaking directly to them, increasing relevance and response.
Interactive Content
Static text-based email is fading in favor of dynamic interactive content to boost engagement.
- Embed clickable image galleries that expand to full screen.
- Incorporate quizzes, assessments, configurators, and other experiences.
- Leverage animations and cinemagraphs to catch the eye.
This rich media content delivers information and offers in bite-sized, engaging formats that subscribers love.
Lead Magnet Promotion
Lead magnet offers in exchange for email signups remain one of the most effective growth tactics. But simply blasting a generic “Download Our eBook” call-to-action fails to motivate action.
Instead, promote your lead magnet by educating subscribers on:
- The problem it addresses for them
- How it simplifies or improves something
- A preview of the tactical advice/answers it provides
This framing speaks directly to what’s in it for them, enticing subscribers to take the next step.
Lifecycle Segmentation
Grouping all subscribers and sending the same broadcasts treats your contacts as one homogeneous group.
However, savvy marketers understand the need to divide based on the subscriber lifecycle stage.
These core lifecycle segments enable targeted messaging:
- Recent converts
- Repeat customers
- At-risk churn risks
- Long-time loyalty program members
- Winback lapsed subscribers
Customizing email content to each group makes messaging extremely relevant. Lifecycle marketing tools can simplify this process by automating segmentation, tracking customer behavior, and personalizing communications at scale, helping businesses connect with customers more effectively.
Automated Journeys
Automating campaigns across the entire customer journey is no longer a “nice-to-have”, but a competitive necessity.
Sophisticated sequences handle everything from:
- New subscriber onboarding
- Browse abandonment wingbacks
- Post-purchase follow-ups
- Loyalty rewards notifications
- Re-engaging inactive contacts
This hands-off automation provides a guided experience while optimizing your team’s time.
Key Email Marketing Metrics To Track
Understanding the essential email metrics to monitor is crucial for continual optimization.
Beyond vanilla metrics like open and click rates, here are the key performance indicators that reveal how your campaigns are performing.
- List growth rate: Are your lead gen efforts successfully expanding your subscriber base, and at what pace?
- Conversion rate: What percentage of recipients take your desired action after an email is sent? Prioritize lifts in purchases, lead gen, or other target goals.
- Revenue per email: Calculate the average revenue generated per broadcast sent over any given period. This quantifies your campaign ROI.
- Unsubscribe rate: A lower unsubscribe rate indicates your subscribers find ongoing value in your messages. Monitor this closely to ensure you’re not burning out contacts.
- Engagement by segment: Break down open, click-through, and conversion rates by subscriber segment. Double down on what works for each lifecycle stage.
- Email sharing: Track social sharing of your emails as secondary exposures and peer endorsements, which can influence others.
- Inbox placement: Monitor inbox vs. spam folder delivery rates to catch issues early before deliverability suffers.
- Email client/device data: Analyze performance by email client (Gmail, Outlook, etc.) and across mobile vs. desktop. Optimize accordingly if gaps emerge.
Continually analyzing these critical email metrics enables you to refine your approach and maximize the value of your programs.
Conclusion
As you can see, email marketing delivers results across a diverse range of business goals. The unique combination of reach, segmentation, automation, and analytics packed into one platform is unmatched.
As part of your overall digital marketing strategy, double down on email campaigns to accelerate growth. Avoid common mistakes like focusing solely on open rates or buying email lists.
Instead, provide genuine value and relevance to your subscribers at every step. Prioritize their needs, and the performance gains will follow quickly.
Once your program builds momentum, email becomes an efficient driver of sales, leads, loyalty, and revenue that runs 24/7. That leaves you free to focus on strategy vs. continual campaign creation.
Hopefully, this overview has shown why email deserves more attention and resources from brands and marketers alike. Use the tips outlined here as a blueprint for maximizing your own email success stories.
Now it’s your turn. Which of these benefits email marketing and trends resonate most for your business? How will you leverage email marketing to accomplish your top business objectives this coming year?
