Long gone are the days when email was just a means for sending and receiving electronic messages. Nowadays, it serves so many purposes that life without it is simply impossible to imagine. Emails are the tool of communication between colleagues, family members living abroad, friends with different life paths… But, before all of that, email is the most effective marketing tool.
How come? Well, regardless of the number of options marketing has at its disposal in the digital world, email still remains the cheapest and the most far-reaching choice. Can you think of anyone you know not using email?
We thought so.
Did We Mention Email Marketing?
Likely we did, but here it is broken down in some more detail. First of all, email marketing campaigns remain the single most efficient sales funnel to this day. The reason is twofold — targeting and feasibility. Email campaigns are by far the cheapest way of advertising and, as for targeting, it is no secret that personalized messages boost sales almost out of sane proportion.
Emails reach so wide of an audience that all other means of online communication lag far behind. I.e., 61 percent of online adults use email on a daily basis, while employees spend 13 hours per week addressing emails, on average.
As for campaign statistics, here is an eye-opener:
- 92 percent of online adults use email
- 57 percent of email subscribers spend anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes browsing email offers (weekly)
- 90 percent of emails reach recipients’ inboxes (compared to 2 percent of Facebook’s newsfeed)
- 83 percent of B2B marketers use email newsletters
- 26 percent of adults check email before getting out of bed
- Mobile users check their emails up to three times more often than computer users (Google)
The Fourth Industrial Revolution
The 4IR is ongoing and is faster than all the three previous combined — up until now, that is, and there are no signs of it slowing down. Suffice it to say that innovation efforts have reached a whole new level, with established large businesses coping with new, rapid developments. If you think design thinking and agile methodologies have nothing to do with email, think again! Even the industry giants such as Bosch have set up mobile teams to learn how to deal with the world going mobile.
Statistics has it that a great majority of emails are accessed via mobile phones, which does say a thing or two about how to successfully run email marketing campaigns. Take a look at some stats:
- The number of new mobile device users is rising at a 20 percent rate per annum
- 53 percent of all emails are read on mobile devices
- 23 percent of people who access emails on mobile devices revisit them not less than once again
- 70 percent of people accessing email on mobile devices tend to re-read them later on, and 65 percent of those emails result in a click
- One-third of all clicks are performed via mobile devices
- Subscriptions predominantly happen on mobile devices
- Emails accessed via a mobile device and re-read on a computer have a 65 percent higher chance of resulting in a click
The Thin Line Between Email and RoI
Keeping all these stats in mind, it’s a no-brainer that all those marketing efforts must result in some incomes. If they didn’t, there’d be no point in forcing marketing campaigns upon customers and those yet to become customers. The stunning 95 percent of companies rely on marketing automation to maximize the effects and boost sales, with statistics showing that they have a 133 percent higher chance of sending relevant messages. In actual fact, it has been established that transactional emails generate six times more revenue than other types of email and get eight times more clicks than other types of email. As a result, targeted email campaigns generate over 75 percent of overall email revenue. Finally, personalized emails generate six times higher transaction rates.
What about customers? The percentage of people adding shopping cart reminders stands at 27.6 percent, which, in turn, triggers a conditioned reaction. Namely, in the U.S. only, 44.9 percent of retailers use personalized product recommendations.
What Will the Future Bring?
There’s no way anyone can tell for certain, but some predictions for the near future underline the importance of email in years to come. For one thing, a total of 3bn people are predicted to use email only in 2020. By the end of 2019, ca. 246bn will have been sent to inboxes worldwide. However, have a care! Stats also show that 18 percent of people check their emails while driving!
Jokes aside (although this one’s a serious issue, you have to admit!), predictions about email evolution border science fiction. For starters, email is predicted to become fully integrated with other marketing channels. Exactly how that would look like, however, no one can tell. What is left for us is to wait for the future to surprise us (positively, let’s hope) and keep checking our inboxes!
