Email is a somewhat unique and interesting form of electronic communication because it was one of the first ways that people utilized the Internet on a mass scale and is still in wide use today. While social media platforms and messaging tools come and go, email has remained popular through those transitions.
Why Email Hasn’t Changed Much
There have been some improvements to email over the years, but the general function and experience of it is basically the same as it was when it came out. In fact, when Internet access was first made available to the public, not many people saw it as being very useful for anything beyond something simple like email.
In the beginning, visiting websites and using live messaging services, for example, were considered by most to be more of a novelty than an essential utility, as we know it today. But even though nearly every consumer on the planet uses the Internet for all kinds of purposes, especially for commerce, they also continue to use email on a daily basis.
Email has barely changed in more than two decades because it is still used mostly for the same reasons, and we still use it for those reasons. As long as people need to send letters, official documents, invitations, promotional materials, and the like, email will still be needed.
Are People Actually Opening Marketing Emails?
Yes, they definitely are. One source (See SOURCES below) shows an average open rate for marketing emails worldwide for early 2018 of between 18% and 35%, depending on your industry. The average click-through rate is right around 5%.
That means if you send out a marketing email to 100 people, 18-35 people are going to open them, and 5 out of those 100 are actually going to follow it to your website. This is the main reason that, of the marketing investments at your disposal, email still has an impressive ROI right now.
There is barely any overhead cost, either, because you don’t even have to lick an envelope or put it in a mailbox. There are also great services like Mailchimp which will send out the emails for you at scheduled times, so you don’t even need to send them yourself.
Link Emails to Your Business Blog
This isn’t limited to sending emails with a message saying, “click here to visit our website”. Obviously, the idea is to draw traffic to your website; however, you can also use this medium to entice potential customers to check out your blog (which brings them to your site). That’s a lot more interesting than just trying to cold-sell them and ask them to come to your site for no real reason.
If you don’t have a blog for your business already, then you need to start one. Check out this post for some insights into the function and benefits of content marketing:
Conversion 101: Create Content that Attracts the Right People
Stephanie
Stephanie is the Marketing Director at Talkroute and has been featured in Forbes, Inc, and Entrepreneur as a leading authority on business and telecommunications.
Stephanie is also the chief editor and contributing author for the Talkroute blog helping more than 100k entrepreneurs to start, run, and grow their businesses.