Long Live the Email

The electronic mail – or e-mail as the cool kids call it – has been around for ages. It has long been one of the most effective ways of business communication. It’s how you set up appointments, it’s how sales departments start the sales process, and it’s how you can communicate with multiple clients at once. The possibilities are endless!

And even though emails have been with us pretty much since the dawn of the internet, they haven’t shown any signs of slowing down in usefulness and overall usage. Campaign Marketer did a brilliant article where they interviewed 10 experts in email marketing and they each gave what their predictions were for email marketing in 2016. The topics range from hyper-targeted emails to interactive emails. Not only are emails NOT slowing down, but they are evolving so that email marketers can further entice their target subscribers. If you’re a lady accessing your email via iPhone and have a more than slight interest in pink hats, your email could look a lot different from a gentleman who has an Android phone and loves wearing penny loafers (you get the point!). Targeted emails have a higher chance of converting because they relate the specific consumer’s needs at the right time for your products. Moving over to visual; have you ever received an email with a GIF animation? They’re quite amusing, and they enhance the overall email experience! Emails nowadays are becoming CSS compatible, which means they will be more visually appealing and, in turn, lead to more conversions.

Of all our available sales tools and technology, emailing is the most adaptable and effective. It’s said again and again that emails lead the highest conversion rate of any other sales medium. Yet only a handful of marketers are taking advantage of the tools at their disposal! GetResponse conducted a large-scale report, titled “The State of Email Marketing by Industry January 2016”. They surveyed 1,831 marketers and analyzed 704,090,593 emails, which is a lot (source: Marketing Land). The report found that 42% of marketers send the same email to everyone on their email list, about 4% actually target their emails with data gathered regarding behaviour, and around 25% of marketers don’t use automation. We think that the 25% who don’t use automation must be composed of mainly small business whose client base isn’t large enough to actually need an automation system. The numbers here show that there is potential for marketers to use emails as other means of targeted marketing and communication between the business and the consumer.

With mobile usage going up, and clients having more access to information from wherever they are, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to target those devices with a specially tailored email? There are so many avenues that email marketing can take us as marketers, and we should be prepared to learn the strategies that go with them.

Whether we like them or not (you should), emails will be with us for the long haul.