Email Marketing: Is it still relevant in 2021?

Digital Marketing
Written By Pursue Persuade

To answer briefly, yes it is still very relevant. Here’s why.

Email has been around since 1971, but its popularity has not subsided within the last 50 years. It is the preferred means of communication for many and virtually impossible to live without, especially with the pandemic this past year. According to MailerLite, email sending increased by 45% in 2020 compared to 2019. In the future years, these numbers are expected to continue to rise as technology advances. The increase of active email users today verifies that email is not going anywhere and proves to businesses and companies the importance of email marketing.

What is email marketing?

Email marketing is a way for businesses and companies to send out commercial email messages to their customers or email subscribers. The emails promote products or services, contain coupons, or include a newsletter about the company. Email marketing has moved away from the one-message fits all and instead, now allows for businesses to develop relationships with their customers through segmentation and personalized messages. You are able to have rich interaction with customers by calling them to actively learn more about your business and contribute to sales.

Why does your business need to utilize email marketing?

Although there are many forms of reaching an audience today, there is nothing that compares to email marketing. The results of a survey done by Hubspot revealed that 91% of consumers use email, making it the best opportunity to reach your target audience. If that’s not enough to convince you, here are 8 reasons why your company needs to utilize email marketing. 

1. Stay personally connected with customers

Emails are able to be crafted with personal touches to remind the customer that you care about them making them feel important. This creates and grows brand loyalty. If they signed up as one of your subscribers, they have already committed themselves to your brand. It’s your job as the company to remind them why they're loyal to you and make them aware of how much you appreciate them as a customer. 

2. Stay in touch in real-time

Consumers are constantly on their phones and according to Litmus, 54% of all emails were opened on a mobile device. This statistic emphasizes how important it is to think about the mobile view of your company’s email while creating content to send out to your subscribers. The email needs to be easy to read and well designed so they are able to consume the material while on the go. 


3. Easy to measure

Emails are an easy way to help learn more about your customers and manage your marketing strategies for them. There are a variety of marketing tools that give you the ability to measure consumers habits on your emails. You could look at open rates which tells you how many email recipients are actually opening and reading the emails you’re sending. The average open rate, according to MailChimp, is analyzed to be about 21.33% across industries which is what your company should strive for. Another way to measure your email marketing strategy is to analyze click through rates which tells you the percentage of subscribers who clicked on a link inside your email. Compare your company’s rate to the average click-through rate which is about 2.62%. Another measurement to keep track of would be bounce rate which tracks the percentage of emails that were unsuccessful in reaching the intended recipient’s inbox so they get sent back to your business. The bounce rate among industries averaged about 0.49% which gives your a good standard for your own business’ rate. Lastly, make sure to watch unsubscribe rates, which lets your business know how many of your recipients clicked the unsubscribe link within your email.


4. Return of Investment

Another measurement that your business should watch is your return on investment (ROI). As you can see in the image below, it’s worth it to put money into your email marketing strategy. It is important for your business to watch and understand the current trends so you are able to implement them into your own email marketing. Doing so may produce an increase in website traffic, sales, and revenue, which it turn produces an increase in ROI. As a company, having a grip on your ROI and the analytics listed above help you better understand the tactics and content that your consumers liked best. When you have this information you can better craft future emails that suit the consumers’ wants and needs from your brand.

5. Affordable

This reason is very clear. Emails are cost efficient for your company. The price to send an email to a subscriber cost about 0.01 cent per email. Reaching your audience through emails is cheap, especially compared to the price of stamps or other marketing strategies. Working with email marketing tools can also be little to not cost for your business.

6. Brand awareness

Emails allow one to one communication between a business and their consumers. By using email marketing, you are reminding them of your brand when they see your name in the inbox. Since emails to your customers can be personalized, seeing an email from you can mean more to them than seeing your brand on social media. However, make sure you are not sending out four emails a day because they most likely will unsubscribe from your list. Your brand will need to find the right strategy to remind your customers who you are, but not annoy them. 


7. Flexible Job Description

Email marketing is flexible when it comes to their purpose. There are different types of the campaign such as promotional or informational. Promotional emails have a clear call to action whether that be to visit a link or make a purchase. These emails promote a sale, special offer, or new product/service. On the other hand, informational emails share important messages with your customers and can come as a newsletter or an announcement. Newsletters are typically sent on a schedule and written in letter form. They include tips, insights, highlights of a product/service, or any other news related to your company. An announcement is a shorter informational piece that contains new releases or information about changes within the business. The flexibility that email offers allows your business to use it for a variety of purposes.

8. Ownership

No one can take away your email list because you own it. There is no third party or algorithms involved when it comes to your subscribers. You would still have direct contact to your customers through email if something happened to your social media accounts because that list is owned by your business.

In Conclusion…

After learning more about email marketing, it is easy to see that it has not lost relevance over the years. Looking at the statistics from Statista, the number of emails that are sent and received every day are to increase from 293.6 billion (2019) to 347.3 billion (2022). Email is growing without a doubt and should be a prominent aspect of your marketing strategy. Do not miss out on the opportunities that it brings for higher sales and better relationships with your customers. 

For more information on email marketing watch HubSpot’s How to Master Email Marketing in 2021 (Guide): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYzmG_7nx3Y 

Pursue Persuade
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