What You Don’t Know About Email Marketing Could Cost You

Is Email Marketing Dead? Statistics Say: Not a Chance.

99% of people check their email everyday.

With a statistic like that, it’s not hard to understand why email marketing is still a go-to strategy for many businesses.

Now we may hear the myth that social media marketing is taking over email marketing. Nobody is checking their email anymore. Really?

It’s true, that there are dead practices, the wrong ways in using email marketing. We will discuss these in details in this article.

We will also look into email marketing from the perspective of statistics, and also the best strategies in using email marketing effectively.

Statistics:

As a start, let’s look at a quick infographic of email marketing statistics:-

Source: Delivra

Email is the oldest and largest marketing channel in the online world. In 2020, the number of global email users are 4 billion, and it is expected to grow to 4.6 billion users in 2025. As compared to other online communication channel, Whatapps is currently stands at 2.0 billion users, Facebook messenger has 1.3 billion users, WeChat has 1 billion users and Telegram has 500 million users.

Half of the global population uses email.

So it is at least twice as much probability that your customers have an email account as compared to any other online communication channel. Furthermore, email is necessarily for doing just about anything online. For example, you can’t even create a Facebook account without an email address.

Approximately 306 billion emails were sent and received everyday around the world. This figure is expected to grow to 376 billion daily users by 2025. Statistics show that even the current trend is heading towards mobile, email users are here to stay. In fact, in Dec 2018, 43% of emails were opened via mobile.

Based on the dominance of mobile, iPhone email app is the most popular email client, which accounted for 29% of email opens. Gmail was ranked 2nd, and was accounted for 27% of email opens.

Number of email users worldwide from 2017 to 2025 (in millions)
Source: Statista

Contrary to the general public’s perception, young people are using email too. Both millennials and Generation Z users use email for school, work and also to engage with their interests or favorite brands. Many young people have at least 2 email address: 1 for social media and marketing material, and 1 for professional and personal communication.

Millennials spend more time scrolling through their inbox than any other generation,
which is about 6.4 hours everyday.

In fact, 73% of millennials prefer email communication when receiving marketing material.

Email Marketing “Dead” Practices

Email isn’t dead, just the strategy is outdated. The problem is not with the marketing channel, but the message delivery. If your brand’s email marketing strategy failed to bring in high ROI, do know that it is not because email marketing is dead, it is because your strategy is outdated.

To improve your email marketing strategy, we first look into email marketing “dead” practices. Awareness comes first. Avoid doing the same old way again and again and expecting different results, just like what Albert Einstein said.

1. Bad subject lines
There is an old saying – “Don’t judge the book by its cover”. That’s totally nonsense! Everyone does judge the book by its cover. If you go to a bookstore, and there are thousands of books available there, you will only pick up the book to read its content if the book title sounds interesting to you. This is the same for an email, you will only open the email if the subject line interests you.

2. Sending mass or general emails
We are living in a noisy world, especially with all the different social media platforms that we have online. If you are going to send a general email about your company products and services, chances are, your email will be ignored as well. This is also one of the main reasons why emails are being place into spam folders.

3. Too much promotional contents
None of us like to be sold. People love to buy, but people don’t like to being sold into something that they are not interested in. Do you like it if someone keep asking you whether you would want to buy their products and services? Won’t u feel disturbed?

4. Using templates that are not mobile friendly
The world is mobile now. As we have discussed earlier, 43% of the emails are opened with mobile phone. Think about it. A lot of us when we wake up in the morning, we first grab our handphone, and that’s could be our first touchpoint that we open our email inbox. So, if your emails are not mobile friendly, your viewers will just turn away and look at something more interesting.

5. Poor email design
If you opened an email that is 100% in text and words, and it’s more than 3 paragraphs long, would you still feed the urge to finish reading it? Most of us are visual persons. We will be more attracted if the emails were well designed with colours and appealing visuals.

6. Not using any tracking metrics
If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it. In the digital world, you can’t afford to shoot things in the dark. Furthermore, if you are not tracking information online, such as email open rate, email bounce rate and email content engagement rate, how are you going to improve? Good tracking metrics drive marketing results.

All in all, the reasons you may not be seeing results in your email marketing is not because email marketing is dead, it’s because of HOW you are email marketing. In fact, email marketing is expected to grow from 4 billion to 4.6 billion users by 2025. Email marketing remains true to a lot of business owners as the most cost-effective way to reach out and to engage our customers.

As the world gets noisier, the true element that builds trust, authority and engagement with our customers is content – content that adds value, content that educates our customers, and content to show social proof of our products and services.

All the email marketing “dead” practices can be solved by using a powerful email automation software. An automated software makes your life easier. And it makes sense on why we ought to use email marketing as one of our marketing channels to grow our business. It is more time and cost efficient.

Would you like to find out how you can use email marketing to get new leads, nurture your leads and get more sales?

Click to download the eBook below to discover the 15 Great Ways to Get More Sales from Leads and Generate Sales Automatically.