Is Email Marketing Dying? 5 Things That Work & 5 That Don’t

As a digital marketing agency, we often hear this question from clients: “I hear some companies are doing well with email, should I be considering it?”

Don’t give up on email marketing just yet. For years, people have been talking about the demise of email marketing, but the numbers say otherwise. Even though it’s more challenging than ever to get customers to open your emails, it’s a proven tool to continuously communicate and engage your customer base. 

(The fact that many of you are reading this blog from a link in an email we’ve sent is some proof it works. ; ) 

If you’ve tried email marketing and have had little success, you’re probably doing it wrong. As a digital marketing agency that prides itself on tune-ups, we can help you fix this. Here we’ll take a look at:

• Why you should be doing email marketing.
• Email marketing statistics.
• Why your email marketing isn’t working.
• Email marketing tactics that work.

Why Email Marketing Is Important

The numbers don’t lie. Billions of people globally use email. Can you think of anyone, other than someone in their senior years, who doesn’t have an email address? 

There are countless studies that back up the effectiveness of email marketing. An infographic by Oberlo, a dropshipping app company, provides some insightful email marketing statistics that make the case for why you should use email marketing to reach your audience:

• In 2019 alone, 293.6 billion emails were sent and received. This is expected to increase to 347.3 billion in 2022. 
• For every dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42.
• The average email open rate is 21%. The average open rate for a welcome email is 82%.
• 49% of customers said they would like to receive promotional emails from their favored brands on a weekly basis. 

5 Email Marketing Mistakes That Should Be Avoided

Your email marketing will not work if you half-ass it. Like any other successful marketing tactic, you need a strategic plan to execute your strategy. 

“In the B2B space, email marketing has a unique set of challenges – but once you learn how to turn the stumbling blocks into stepping stones, it is still a sure-fire way to win over customers and generate plenty of business,” says Jeff Bullas, a leading social marketing guru and top business blogger.

“What we need to understand is that email marketing campaigns do not fail because there is too much clutter to break through. They fail because of the inability of their marketer to chalk out a robust email campaign strategy,” he adds.

There are a lot of common email marketing mistakes most businesses are guilty of. As a digital marketing agency focused on performance, we created a 13 point checklist for great email marketing performance called ‘13 Ways To Make Email Marketing That’s Uncanny, Not Spammy.” Here are some mistakes to avoid:

1. It’s a bad list: Is it filled with people who know and value the relationship you have with them or is it just a ‘dusty shoebox’ of emails that’s been lying around?

2. Your email list is out of date: You haven’t updated your contacts recently. Should be fresh within the last two years. If they haven’t opened, you don’t want them.

3. Your content isn’t helpful: Did you know that an educational email is kept 2 years on average! Maybe what you’re sending is too promotional and/or not relevant to your customers. Are you failing to provide true value for opening?

4. Your email lacks personalization: If you can’t target people specifically, at least segment according to their interests or previous actions.

5. Lack of excitement: You fail to capture your readers’ attention with a great subject line. Subject lines are 30% of why they open.

5 Email Marketing Tactics That Work

Boost the success of your email marketing campaigns by putting these strategies into action:

1. Personalize your messages: Are you going to open and read a generic email? Probably not. But, if an email is personalized to you, the odds of you reading it increases significantly. Use as much personalized information as possible. The best part is that most brands don’t personalize their emails, even in 2021. This is a huge opportunity for you to differentiate from your competitors.

2. Write masterful eMail Marketing subject lines: Subject lines are 30% of why they open. If you do not capture the attention of readers with an enticing subject line, they aren’t going to read your email. No matter how good your email copy may be, it won’t be effective if you can’t get readers to open your email. You should spend as much time writing subject line options as you do writing the eMail. And keep them 5-7 words long.

3. Segment your email marketing list: Most companies do not spend the time to segment their email list or align it with where customers are in the sales cycle. If you segment your email list, you can write more specific and focused messaging. This will help increase open rates. You can segment your emails based on customer profiles, industry, purchase history, or other groupings that make sense for your business.

4. Be mobile-friendly: More than half of all emails are opened on a mobile device. So, format your emails to be easy to read on phones and tablets. Readers will delete the email if they have formatting issues or challenging-to-read text and graphics. That means emails that are more text than big huge picture are gaining favour.

5. Test your way to email success: Test and track your email marketing to identify what works and what doesn’t. Use A/B testing to see what subject lines, messages, CTAs, and designs work best and even sender names (we recently saw a 39% in open rate by changing the sender name!). Make adjustments to your emails over time and watch your ROI increase.

Email marketing is far from dead. In fact, it’s the original shareable social medium and it gets an ‘A’ in ‘plays well with others’. We’ve seen well-crafted eNewsletters have a massive uplift on our client’s blog, search traffic, and overall traffic every time they’re sent out. Hopefully this list will get you started.

If you’re a company that needs help tuning the performance of your email and your other digital marketing, we’d be happy to get our full list of tips & tricks working for you.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing agency that has extensive experience in developing effective email marketing strategies. We help businesses fix their digital marketing strategies like email marketing. We are a results-driven marketing company working across many different sectors in North America.

The Marketing Garage is an award-winning Toronto digital marketing company that has extensive experience in cultivating effective digital marketing strategies. We help businesses in many different sectors across North America fix their online marketing and branding. Our data-driven mix of SEO and digital marketing process is like no other.