The benefits of email marketing are huge. When resources are limited, budgets are tight, time is short, and conversions are needed, who do you call? Or rather — more practically speaking — who do you send? (Because, really, who uses a phone to make calls anymore.) Email, that’s what you use. Or at least hopefully you do. Because when it comes to marketing, your business can’t afford to ignore the value of email. The advantages of email marketing in today’s world of internet first business and eCommerce means that you could be missing out on tons of opportunities to grow traffic, target high-value audiences, reduce acquisition cost, and boost all around revenue. Don’t believe us? Keep reading. We’re about to share the benefits of email marketing, and how your business can best take advantage of them. We’ll do this in three parts:

1. The Number One Email Marketing Statistic You Need to Know
2. What is Email Marketing? The Only Overview You’ll Ever Need
3. 9 Advantages of Email Marketing for Your Business

Let’s get to it.

The number one email marketing statistic you need to know

On average, email generates $42 for every $1 spent. That’s a 4,200% return on investment! You know what else gives you a 4,200% ROI? Nothing. (Save for maybe your dog’s love.) Email’s average return on ad spend (ROAS) is up from 38:1 in 2018. Which means email is growing more valuable. That’s great news considering over 4 billion people —  half the world’s population — use email. For comparison, in our look at how to drive more traffic to your site using Facebook, we found that marketing to Facebook’s roughly 2.8 billion users generates a ROAS of 8:1. (That’s one fifth as valuable as email.) Now don’t get us wrong, Facebook is an amazing platform for growth, but it’s no email. This is perhaps one of the single biggest advantages of email marketing: its upfront ROI is world renowned. In terms of industry share, the travel industry has shown the greatest return (at $53 for every $1 spent). But the rest aren’t far behind, including entertainment (45:1), retail and eCommerce (45:1), and software and technology (40:1). So, if anyone ever asks why you need email marketing, throw these ROAS email marketing statistics at their face.

What is email marketing? The only overview you’ll ever need

Email marketing is the use of email — go figure — to promote products or services, qualify prospects, and boost customer loyalty. That’s email marketing defined in a nutshell. But in truth email marketing is an umbrella term that encompasses two categories of messaging.

1. Cold Emails (aka Prospecting Emails)
2. Warm Emails (aka Marketing Emails)

Cold emails target people who are either unfamiliar with your brand or have yet to engage with it. These people are commonly referred to as prospects.

Cold Email

• Audience Target: Prospects
• Objective: Introduce your business. Convey authority. Engage the recipient. Enter them into your sales funnel.
• Benefits:
  • Grows your brand’s reach
  • Builds your contact lists
  • Increases site traffic
  • Poaches customers from competition
  • Turns prospects into leads
• Tactic: Cold emails are written as short, simple, plain text messages. Like the kind of email you would send to a friend. They do not contain graphics or images. They contain a singular, soft call-to-action (CTA), such as “learn more” or “contact us.”

Warm emails target people who already engaged with your brand and opted in to receive additional emails from you. This can include either existing customers or leads. There are several different kinds of leads, including marketing qualified leads (MQL), sales accepted leads (SAL), and sales qualified leads (SQL).

Warm Email

• Audience Target: MQL, SAL, SQL and customers
• Objective: Convey authority. Engage the recipient. Convert the recipient. Build loyalty.
• Benefits:
  • Builds a relationship with contacts
  • Turns leads into customers
  • Increases site traffic
  • Improves conversions
  • Generates repeat business
• Tactic: Warm emails are written as informative, visually engaging, HTML-based messages. (Though they can also be written as plain text messages as well.) They often use styling, graphics and images. They can contain either singular or multiple hard CTAs, such as “buy now” or “sign up”

Cold versus warm emailing is actually only one of several different ways to differentiate the two sides of email marketing. Another is defining your messaging as inbound or outbound.

1. Outbound Email Marketing: A business contacts a prospect first by sending messaging out to them unsolicited. Cold emailing is considering outbound marketing.
2. Inbound Email Marketing: A prospect engages with a business first by entering into its sales funnel via one of the brands touchpoints. Warm emailing is considered inbound marketing.

And finally, email marketing can further be split up into two different categories according to department:

1. Email Marketing for your sales department
2. Email Marketing for your marketing department

This all might seem like semantics, but understanding the complete and full answer to ‘what is email marketing?’ can help better focus your strategy and determine which aspects to implement when. In other words, treating email marketing as a singular process of sending out emails en masse to a contact list is not enough. You need to think of it as a multi-faceted operation. It’s best to visualize all this in terms of your sales funnel.

To get the maximum benefit from your email marketing strategy, you need to pinpoint the audience in the sales funnel you want to target. This will then help you determine which types of emails to send. The types of emails you might send include:

• Prospecting Emails
• Welcome Emails
• Lead Nurturing Emails
• Newsletters
• Promotional Emails
• Seasonal Emails
• Transactional Emails
• Post-Purchase Emails
• Cart-Abandonment Emails
• Branding Emails

Email marketing can involve sending out a succession of automated emails as part of a drip campaign (like welcome emails) or may involve a one-off message around a specific topic or event (like promotional emails). That’s email marketing defined comprehensively. It’s also a cliff notes version of how email marketing can benefit your business. Now let’s take a more nuanced look at the advantages.

9 Advantages of email marketing for your business

1. Email Marketing Drives More Sales Than Social Media Marketing

The benefits of email marketing compared to other marketing channels is sizable, as we saw with our look at ROAS above. Further the case, 60% of consumers say they’ve made a purchase due to email marketing, while only 12.5% considered a buy button as a purchase driver on social media.

2. Email Marketing is One of the Fastest Ways to Engage Customers

Almost 22% of opened emails are opened within the first hour of being sent. That’s staggeringly fast. Within six hours, over half have been opened. If your messaging is time sensitive, email is a surefire way to get the word out fast.

3. Email Marketing is One of the Cheapest Ways to Engage Customers

When it comes to cost-effectiveness, few marketing methods match email. Unlike paid media there’s no fee to send an email or have someone click on it. Unlike with social media, there’s no charge to boost your emails and ensure they reach the majority of your contacts. Unlike SEO, you don’t have to wait for pages to move up the ranks to drive traffic, draining not only time but your budget. Unlike print media, there’s no printing or mailing costs. Sure, there’s some overhead in designing email campaigns and building contact lists, but compared to other marketing methods these costs are far lower.

4. People Love Getting Emails. A Lot of Emails.

One of the biggest hesitations we see from clients when it comes to email marketing is not wanting to annoy customers. Sure, if you’re sending three emails a day you’re probably overdoing it. But you might be surprised how many emails your contacts are willing to put up with. Studies have shown that 49% of consumers enjoy receiving promotional emails weekly. Further data suggests that sending 2-3 emails a month is the sweet spot. Point is, your audience likes to hear from you. And email marketing is a great way to connect.

5. Personalizing Email Marketing Campaigns is Easy

Personalization is the number one most important factor when it comes to marketing. If someone can relate to your content, they’re more likely to engage. Plain and simple. Thanks to merge fields and list segmentation, personalizing your messages is a cinch with email marketing. The average email open rate is around 20%. But personalize your subject line (like using a merge field to insert a contact’s name) and that open rate jumps 50% higher. Likewise, segmentation drives 50% more click-throughs. (Segmentation is when you send unique messages to different groups of your list.) Best of all, this high-level of personalization can be accomplished in a matter of seconds, and sometimes be completely automated. Speaking of which…

6. Email Marketing Can Be Mostly Automated

The less time you spend sending out emails, the more money you’ll have to put towards other strategies. And if there’s one way email marketing outshines all other forms of marketing, it is with how efficiently and effectively it allows you to utilize automation. In fact, it’s said automated emails generate 320% more revenue than non-automated emails. From automated welcome drip campaigns to automated abandoned cart emails, email outreach excels at engaging and re-engaging your audience without you ever having to lift a finger.

7. Email Marketing Improves SEO

Email marketing makes it really easy to enhance your SEO efforts. We’d go so far as to say it’s one of the most overlooked SEO tactics. Especially if you have a large contact list. As we’ve already seen, email is very effective at distributing your content and equally as effective at driving qualified traffic to your site. One of the advantages of email marketing is that more traffic equals improved SEO. Even though email marketing has no direct effect on algorithmic search rankings across Google or Bing, it can help drive back-link growth to your domain which is an important SEO ranking factor. Plus, high-quality email content can work cohesively with your on-site content which can mean better keyword density, high-value EAT content, higher CTR/CR across multiple channels. All-in-all natural link growth and brand visibility or key to better SEO results.

8. Email Marketing is a Direct Line to Your Audience

One of the best benefits of email marketing is that it lets you communicate directly with your audience. All of your audience. The majority of your contact lists will receive your messaging. (That is, as long as you’ve taken the necessary precautions to warm up your domain and avoid spam filters.) Something that can’t be said for other platforms, like Facebook where only about 5.2% of your followers ever see your non-paid posts. Building trust is one of the most important components of selling. Trust leads to loyalty. And loyalty leads to growth. But if you can’t reach your audience effectively, all that is lost. Luckily, email marketing lets you build an authentic connection with your customers. On your own terms…

9. Email Provides Complete Control Over Your Marketing

The more people you can connect with, the greater your chance of success. But not all marketing channels let you control this strategy. In fact, with platforms like social media, you don’t own your contact list or even your information at all. At any time it could disappear. (Just ask your Google+ account. Oh wait.) If Facebook, Instagram or Twitter disappeared tomorrow, how many customers would you lose? Luckily, you’ll never have to worry about that with email. That’s because you retain complete control over your email contact lists at all times.

Conclusion: the benefits of email Marketing are huge

Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective and conversion-rich marketing methods. It helps small businesses reach new customers and grow their revenue on minimal budgets. It helps larger businesses generate leads and engage their customers at scale. That said, there are a lot of digital marketing options out there. So is email marketing really worth it when compared to those others? YES! The benefits of email marketing speak for themselves. But if you ever forget why, just remember this one stat… 42:1. Enough said. Learn More If you’re looking to take advantage of that stat, grow your business and sustain it, you need to implement email outreach effectively today. Contact our team to learn more!   About the author: We’re an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay Per Click) company based in San Diego. Our team of passionate experts are driven by client success. We live, breathe and sleep SEO and PPC and we strive to crush our client’s competition. Our team is never satisfied, no matter how well our clients are doing, because in the evolving online world we pride ourselves on finding new ways to keep them at the forefront of search engine technology. No matter the size of your company, it’s our number one goal to always make sure you are seen and heard.