A lot of onus is placed on new media in marketing campaigns- everyone wants to be on the cutting edge. I haven't personally been asked if I could incorporate VR to a campaign yet, but it's a matter of time at this point. Despite the myriad of crazy, new options we have to play with now though, email marketing still provides the most value for the money that is spent on it. It replaced cold calling, which today can be a painful task that sees little success given that many people haven't used their phone as an actual phone since high-school. Social media can work but you're competing with pictures of cute dogs and next-level smashed avo brunches (if your feed is anything like mine, anyway). Banner ads are ignored completely or, more likely, totally blocked by ad blockers. As far as a return on interest goes, email marketing is still king when it comes to digital marketing.

 

According to a report released by world-famous consulting firm McKinsey, email marketing is about 40 times more effective per dollar spent than social media marketing on giants Facebook and Twitter. The reason is simple, sending an email is cheap as chips. The entire cost is in the acquisition of the qualified email address and the management system used to push a large amount of emails at the same time. Compared to the small fortunes that the social media giants charge for long-term advertising, it becomes immediately apparent who is going to take your dollar further.



 

In fact, the ROI on email marketing may be the highest of any other ad dollar spent. According to a report by Campaign Monitor, the average return on investment (world wide) for a dollar invested in email marketing is $44. That's crazy money! Dolla dolla bills, y'all.

 

Over 293 billion emails are sent every single day around the world, and I'm willing to bet that a majority of those are from someone trying to get someone else to buy something. That, or Nigerian Princes who have a surprisingly robust email strategy; I'm actually chatting to a couple of them right now about about a surprise inheritance I had no idea about. This enormous flow of communication validates the continued importance of this as a medium for speaking to people and spreading a message, and it's only growing stronger. In fact, the number of emails will grow to almost 437 billion daily by 2023. While paper advertising is coming to terms with its own mortality (RIP in advance, newspapers), email shows no sign of slowing or weakening... it's in this race to win.


Email is also still the preferred communication method for the consumers themselves. While most people consider the phone-bits of their phones to be reserved for use by friends and family, purchasing decisions were predominantly done over (or supported by) email. In fact, 72% of respondents preferred email for business communication and 61% of consumers like getting emails for promotional activities. With these types of responses, it is no wonder that marketers see an unending stream of use cases for email.

Email marketing can be used to nurture and convert leads, increase customer feedback including Google and Facebook reviews or it can be used as a tool to measure the effectiveness of content and the rest of your marketing campaign.

So at this point, having an email strategy for getting in with your customers should be a no-brainer. It's an effective, cheap, efficient method of communication that, and this is the most important part, people actually want to use. So use it!

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