In today’s digital age, several marketers are now highlighting the importance of social media marketing since they think that it might be the most cost-effective way to create ads and attract more and more potential consumers to their company. Yes! It can be right! However, let’s take a moment to think about this. “How many hours you, as a marketer, spend on email marketing?” If your answer is too little or no time, as compared to social medial marketing – you are missing out so many opportunities email marketing can cause. This blog will help you realize why email marketing is one of the greatest marketing tools.

Let me explain how great email marketing is in field of marketing.

1. Number of Users

• We first look at the number of users on social media; Facebook and Twitter in comparison to email usage.
• Facebook and Twitter have over 1 billion active users and 255 million per month respectively, which makes sense why marketers want to spend a large amount of time on social media.
• It is time to see the statistics on email usage. Some of you will be surprised. According to Radicati, the total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and projected to be 4.9 billion by 2017.

• It shows that the number of email users are so much higher than those social media users, which means there are stronger user bases than those social media networks that you, as a marketer, can target for your company.

 

2. Open Rates and Click-Through Rates

• Through ads or posts you create on either social median or email, “What do you want to achieve?” Of course, you want to get high open rates and click-through rates. Then, you will see how effective email marketing is as compared to social media.
• According to Campaign Monitor, the organic reach on Facebook is only 6% while open rates for email marketing are between 20% and 30%.

• In addition to open rates, click-through rates for email marketing are higher than social media, accounting for 3% and 0.5% for Tweets.
• According to the test conducted by marketing blogger, Dereck Halpern, who sent his blog posts to the same people through both email and Twitter, 300 people clicked through to the post from Twitter whereas 4,200 people clicked through to the post from email.

 

3. Purchasing Behavior

• Although those data that I mentioned above shows that email marketing has higher open rates and click-through than social media, if those consumers do not take any action, such as making a purchase and so on, there is no point in utilizing email marketing strategy. As such, I have found how many consumers see the ads or posts, and has made a purchase through various medias.

• It is clear that through email ads or posts, higher number of consumers have made a purchase than other channels, which proves the effectiveness of email marketing.

 

4. ROI (Return On Investment)

• As you know, before you invest money on something, ROI is one of the important aspects that you want to look at. The investment on marketing strategy is the same thing. The fact that you spend less money and get higher ROI means you are doing great.
• Based on the finding from Campaign Monitor, the ROI for email marketing is the highest among 8 different marketing channels, which means for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $38 in ROI.

Conclusion

It is understandable for some of marketers put much effort on social media marketing since they have high number of user bases. However, email marketing will be one of the most effective and efficient marketing strategies that you, as a marketer, need to focus on. I am not saying that you have to give up on social media marketing.

Rather, I would like to suggest that you take a look at those great benefits mentioned above, that email marketing could bring to you, so that you can realize that email marketing can be one of the greatest marketing tools that you can utilize to attract more potential customers and increase profitability.

 

If you want to find more information on how to utilize and improve email marketing, visit the blog, Why Email Marketing is Still Relevant, and How You Can Improve It or take Marketing in the Digital Age class online.

Sunsik Nam is a senior at University of Wisconsin-Madison, majoring in Marketing. You can connect with him on his LinkedIn.