As other digital marketing strategies have evolved, one question that keeps coming up is:
“Is email marketing still important?”

In short, yes. Creating a strong email marketing strategy helps you reach and connect with your target audience in a personalized way and increase sales at an affordable cost. Just as other platforms and media have changed, email marketing tools make it easier than ever for you to reach customers.

Here are the top nine reasons why email marketing is important and how it can help your business:

1. Stay in contact with your audience

Emails keep your customers informed and let them know that you’re thinking of them. This email can be as simple as saying: “Hi, you’re on our mind. Here’s a special offer!” or “Here’s an update on what we’ve been doing in recent weeks.” Customers that have signed up for your email list have already made a commitment to receive these notes. They’ll likely enjoy these emails (as long as you give them something worth reading) and it will boost engagement.

2. Reach customers in real time

According to Litmus, 54% of all emails are opened on a mobile device. This is significant and should come into play when planning any marketing strategy. More and more, consumers are using their mobile devices to access emails and other types of media and information. Not only that, well-designed emails produce higher conversion rates on mobile than any other medium. Hit ’em on the go!

3. People engage with emails

Email has been a form of communication for more than 40 years, and it has become one of our main forms of communication. We’ve all been groomed to reply to an email in some fashion —reply, forward, click through links, delete, buy something, or sign up. Knowing this, you can use email to drive people to your website, to pick up the phone and call or perform any other call to action. In fact, over 25 percent of sales last year were attributed to email marketing.

4. Email marketing is easy to measure

Most email marketing tools offer the ability to track what happens after you have sent out your email campaign. You can track delivery rates, bounce rates, unsubscribe rates, click through rates, and open rates to get a better understanding of how your email campaigns are working. This helps you know which ones to tweak or which ones to get rid of altogether. These metrics should not be ignored — they’re an important part of your internet marketing campaign as a whole.

5. It’s affordable

Email marketing lets you reach a large number of consumers for less than pennies per message. The cost per (possible) conversion is so low with email marketing, I can’t believe that every company doesn’t participate, or engage more often.

Email marketing services such as SendGrid cost $0.0006 cents per message at their Platinum Marketing Email level. Mail Chimp allows you to send up to 12,000 emails a month for free and offer larger monthly plans for growing businesses with up to 600,000 subscribers and high-volume sender plans. Vertical Response, another email marketing company, offers free email marketing up to 4,000 emails a month and 1,000 email contacts. They also offer subscription services for higher-volume senders.

While email marketing does offer a significant ROI, it might be a wise idea to hire someone to manage these efforts. According to Shout It Out Designs, at a 15,000 email database, your company would spend about 152 hours per year managing the campaign. This would include writing, drafting, scheduling, sending emails, answering any questions about offers, missing coupons or other concerns and database maintenance.

6. Allows for targeted messaging

Email marketing is very important when it comes to lead nurturing. The main idea here is that your potential customers are at different stages of the buying cycle. Some may be in the consideration stage, while others may be at the research and compare stage, and others may be in the ready-to-purchase stage. Creating buyer personas can help you determine what kind of content to create for each step.

Segmenting these customers into appropriate email marketing lists can help you target these groups more effectively. Customers need information to move them to the next buying cycle stage and pushing the right content can do just that. It’s all about moving these prospects down your sales funnel – not as quickly as possible, but as efficiently as possible.

7. Increase brand awareness

Social media isn’t the only platform that helps a company’s brand awareness. Having a customer or prospect’s email address means one thing: they showed a level of interest in your business. Email marketing gives you the ability to increase that interest level by staying top of mind.

This doesn’t mean you have to send four daily emails to every single customer. That’s actually a great way to get customers to hate you. Instead, try some email marketing that promotes your activeness in the local community. Too many times companies try to sell their products through email marketing and completely ignore the brand awareness factor. By doing this, they’re also prohibiting the ultimate possibility of building customer trust and adding a sense of personality to their brand.

8. It’s timely

One of the benefits of email marketing can be to sell your products, if you approach it in the correct fashion. It’s important to use all the customer data and information you can. Sending customers a special offer on their birthday, or letting them know their favorite dish is half-off is much more effective than simply sending them a menu.

This email marketing strategy also can incorporate seasonal offers, like a holiday special or an annual sale. Be sure to create a sense of urgency for any offer – customers are much more likely to purchase when a deal is ending soon.

9. Everyone (almost) uses email

A Hubspot survey states that 91% of consumers use email. That alone should be enough to convince you to explore the tool. Unless your industry accounts for the remaining 9% (hint: it doesn’t), email presents an incredible opportunity to reach customers. Not only can you provide them with discounts, specials, new products, and more, they can also share and forward those emails to anyone they’d like. A good email marketing strategy is to encourage customers to share offers as much as possible. Remember brand awareness?