Think Email Marketing Is Dead? You’re Dead Wrong

If you're just setting out on the rocky road of marketing your small business, you'll quickly trip over advanced concepts: artificial intelligence (AI)-powered segmentation, omnichannel marketing automation, or SMS and social media marketing, for a few. And these are all effective tools for diligent digital promotion. But one of the most effective tools—and a perfect place for beginners to start—is email marketing.

Email marketing remains at the core of most digital-marketing tool suites, even though it's been around for almost as long as email itself. But despite its age, the channel has kept up with the times and remains a top way to reach your customers. EmailToolTesters recently compiled a study of the most current email-marketing strategies and trends based on data from Techjury, Statista, Content Marketing Institute, Salecycle, Blog HubSpot, Klaviyo, Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, and Constant Contact.

Even though you have several new ways to connect with customers—particularly social media—the study found that the email channel still has a massive reach with 4.3 billion people using email and more than 361.6 billion emails flitting around every day. If you think that sounds like a firehose of bits in which your emails will probably get lost, you'd be wrong. The study showed that email-marketing ROI is currently calculated to be 4,400%, or about $44 return on every dollar you spend in your marketing campaign.

The study also had some interesting statistics on strategy. For example, as far as what kinds of emails get the best return, which generally refers to how many of them are actually opened by potential customers, welcome emails top the list with a hefty 82.21% open rate. The next best were triggered emails, which came in at 44.07%. Unfortunately, the email type that's most popular with smaller businesses, because it's easier to create and provides value-added content to your audience, is the email newsletter. According to the study, these emails have the lowest open rate, at 20.48%.

But the study is quick to point out that you shouldn't ignore newsletters. There are several ways to increase the effectiveness of any kind of email content, especially newsletters, including personalization and autoresponders. Another way is by optimizing your email for the most popular email readers—those from Apple, Google, and Microsoft—and doing so not only for desktop users but also for the fast-growing number of mobile users.

A really attractive part of email marketing is that the top tools, including Campaign Monitor, GetResponse, and our Editors' Choice winner, Mailchimp, are all migrating towards omnichannel marketing while keeping email as a central focus. That means you can quickly build a marketing campaign that starts with an email and then automatically switches to follow-up emails, social media engagements, or SMS (text) marketing as the customer's experience changes. Check out the study's full infographic below for more information.

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