Why Email Marketing Is So Important – Everything You Need to Know in 2023

While there have never been more ways to draw traffic to your website, email marketing still remains one of the most important.

But you don’t have to take my word for it…

Before we get into some examples of why email marketing remains one of the most important marketing channels in 2023, I want to make sure we establish my premise first.

In case you’re on the fence about whether or not email marketing is still incredibly effective, here are some stats that prove it.

From HubSpot’s article on email marketing stats, here are seven of my favorites:

• 77% of email marketers have enjoyed an increased engagement rate since last year
• 64% of B2B marketers report that their email marketing efforts were effective in meeting their business goals in 2021
• 50% of people say they have made a purchase because of emails AT LEAST once a month
• 37% of companies are increasing their email marketing budgets in 2022
• 33% of email marketers send weekly emails; 26% of them send multiple emails a month
• 22% of marketers are planning to invest in email marketing for the first time this year
• The majority of businesses utilize mobile-friendly emails

The list goes on and on, but hopefully the point is clear by now.

Email marketing still matters.

Arguably, it matters more than ever.

Which is why mail marketing is expected to create nearly $11 billion in revenue by 2023.

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/email-marketing-stats

Will your company’s revenue represent a piece of that massive pie?

An effective email marketing strategy could easily be one of the best – and most cost-effective – strategies for improving your company’s revenue in 2022.

Here are nine reasons email marketing campaigns are one of the best ways to increase your profits.

There’s just no other marketing channel that can claim an ROI anywhere near that of email marketing.

Companies that invest in this essential strategy see $36 for every $1 they invest in this approach.

And for eCommerce companies like our clients, the ROI can easily be as high as 45x!

Source: https://www.litmus.com/blog/infographic-the-roi-of-email-marketing/

So, that should probably end the entire debate right there.

Is email marketing still important in 2022?

Yes – if you like absolutely insane ROIs for your marketing budgets.

But let’s keep looking at other reasons email marketing is so effective, so you can see how it produces this kind of incredible return on investment.

One of the reasons email marketing remains so effective is that EVERYONE has an email address.

Even better, the vast majority of us check our inboxes multiple times a day.

This point might seem a bit obvious, but the upshot is crucial to understanding the importance of email marketing: you can reach the most engaged members of your market WHENEVER YOU WANT.

Everyone knows SEO takes time – often between 6-12 months to really “work.”

Paid and social may have a faster turnaround, but it’s not uncommon for paid campaign to take a month or two before producing any kind of ROI. And, of course, you pay for every step along the way – regardless of the results.

But email is instantaneous.

Have inventory you need to clear?

Run a flash sale and then send out an email so your market knows about it right away.

Running out of time to hit your quarterly sales goals?

Just email your list with an offer that drives them to your site.

Maybe you just have a new blog post up and don’t want to wait for Google to get around to putting it in front of people.

Email to the rescue – immediately.

That last example above is especially important for B2B marketers. 91% of them report that email is “important” or “extremely important” as a distribution channel for their online content (e.g., blogs).

I wouldn’t be surprised if B2C marketers would have similar feelings.

So, while writing blog posts that do well in Google is extremely important, you’re leaving money on the table if you can’t leverage email to bring that content even more attention.

This is particularly true for blog posts that focus on bottom-of-the-funnel topics (i.e., those geared at securing a sale).

People who are signed up to your email list may not be actively seeking out these kinds of posts on Google. They’re not on Google asking the kinds of questions that otherwise take searchers to your blog posts.

Of course, this means they’re not falling into your competitors’ content marketing funnels, either.

But this is why email marketing could become your secret content-marketing weapon. You can use it to put your blog posts in front of customers who aren’t actively searching for those topics. This improves the reach of those posts, which means a greater ROI, too.  

Easily one of the most important reasons email marketing is so effective is because it is so incredibly customizable.

We just mentioned how great blogs can be, but one thing they’re not is endlessly customizable. They have their limits. While you can create different posts for different steps of your content marketing funnel, those steps still typically represent a fairly broad audience.

Even paid, social, and display ads have limitations as far as customization goes.

But with email marketing campaigns, your ability to customize these strategies – and, therefore, their effectiveness – is truly endless.

In fact, according to HubSpot, two of the most effective email marketing strategies leverage this high level of customization:

• Subscriber Segmentation
• Message Personalization

Segmentation is an absolute force-multiplier for email campaigns, too.

Marketers who use email segmentation report that their revenues for this channel skyrocket an amazing 760%!

And segmenting campaigns, alone, results in clickthrough rates that are 100.95% higher!

Once you have your list properly segmented, you can make the most of personalization to really improve results.

For example, something as simple as a personalized email subject line leads to a 26% higher open rate.

So, it’s no surprise that these personalized emails have 6x the conversions.

Those kinds of stats represent incredible potential for improving your company’s annual revenue – all without significantly increasing overhead.

Paid ads lend themselves to A/B testing, but this often comes with a decent price tag. While the results of a PPC ad A/B test may be insightful, you’re still paying for all of the clicks along the way – including the ones that didn’t result in a purchase.

And, of course, if that A/B testing doesn’t yield anything helpful, you only have a smaller budget to show for it.

But with email marketing, you can A/B test LIKE CRAZY without worrying that every effort is costing you.

While there are still A/B testing best practices you need to follow for email marketing (e.g., you can’t just email your list anything), the overhead involved is almost nonexistent compared to what it would cost to test different ideas for SEO, PPC, or even social.

And because it’s so cost-effective, most companies can afford to A/B test their email marketing campaigns again and again until they see the kind of ROI that has made this channel so popular.

In 2022, most people use mobile devices to access the Internet.

While the share of mobile users drops a bit when it comes to B2B companies, they still represent a significant percentage of your market.

And as I mentioned earlier, most people check their emails multiple times a day. That represents multiple times one of your emails could grab their attention, bring them to your mobile-friendly website, and secure a new sale.

Simply put, no marketing strategy is more effective than retargeting campaigns.

Unfortunately, most companies only invest in the paid marketing version of retargeting.

While this is still incredibly effective, you can also utilize your email list to retarget those highly-qualified prospects, too.

Whereas conventional retargeting ads show up for anyone who’s previously visited your website, email retargeting ads are aimed at those who subscribe to your list. A simple line of code in your email’s HTML or signature ensures that your ads will only run for people who opened that particular message.

This takes segmentation to a whole other level.

By sending different emails to different segments, you can then also market to these unique segments differently when they’re elsewhere online.

The effect this will have on your PPC budget’s ROI is hard to overstate.

And when you combine this approach with conventional retargeting campaigns, the result is even better. On average, companies that do both find that their CONVERSIONS DOUBLE.

The easiest way to prove just how important email marketing still is to your bottom line may be by creating abandoned cart campaigns.

These will be a total game changer or your business.

Like email retargeting campaigns, abandoned cart emails only go out to people who have already proven they are interested in what you sell. So, right off the bat, they’re focused on incredibly qualified traffic.

But these campaigns actually take things a step further because they only go out to customers who went so far as to put items in their carts at checkout. They went through the shopping process. They considered their options. And they liked one or more of them enough to put them in a cart.

For whatever reason, they didn’t actually complete their purchase, though. This results in the bane of every marketer’s existence: a high cart abandonment rate.

Dropping cart abandonments means more revenue for your company and better ROI on the rest of your marketing efforts.

And one of the easiest ways to do this is by simply sending those customers an email to let them know they have items in their carts. Often, this simple reminder is all it takes to get the sale and, thus, a return on all the marketing investments that led to that conversion.

Automating these emails so that they go out within three hours of an abandoned cart resulted in a 40% open rate and an even more incredible 20% clickthrough rate!

Would instantly increasing your conversion rate by 20% help out your business?

Given how much email marketing can do for your business, you might expect that it comes with an equally large price tag.

And yet, email marketing is often one of the most affordable channels, too.

While building up a reliable email list may require a significant upfront investment, once it’s built, you can send emails to it again and again that will produce steady returns. You can usually use affordable assets like your blog, social media pages, and YouTube channel to continue growing that list, too.

After that, all it takes is an email automation platform (we love Klaviyo) to start sending campaigns that bring in brand-new profits.

While you can always spend more on A/B testing, better images/videos, and other assets that may make your messages more engaging, that’s hardly necessary to start seeing results in the beginning.

Obviously, we’re big fans of email marketing, but we’re definitely not alone. For all the reasons we covered above – and plenty more – email remains as important as any marketing channel out there.

Will it work for your company, though?

Let’s look at three important questions to help you decide.

Email marketing is never a bad idea, but it’s most effective for companies that depend on repeat business.

So, if you’re, say, a real estate agent, you probably won’t see dramatic results from creating an email list of people whom you’ve helped in the past. It’s just very unlikely that they’ll be in the market to buy or sell a house again anytime soon.

On the other hand, email marketing has proven essential to eCommerce companies that hope to sell their products to the same customers again and again. They don’t just thrive on repeat business. They depend on it.

But even if you tend to only convert the same customer once a year – or even every few years – email marketing can be an important strategy.

Many car dealerships, for example, rely on email marketing to advertise upcoming sales and keep their locations top-of-mind, so customers think of them the moment they’re ready to make a purchase.

As you’ve probably picked up on by now, a big part of an email marketing campaign’s effectiveness depends on having a list of email addresses. These can be subscribers to your newsletter, prospects who traded their email for content, customers who have already bought from you, etc.

Whatever the case, your email campaigns depend heavily on having a list of people who are qualified to convert.

The good news is that any company can build this kind of email list. It just takes time.

Not necessarily a lot of time, either. As this case study on building an effective email marketing list shows, some companies have been able to create massive lists in as little as a month.

But depending on your current resources, if you’re looking for some “quick wins” in the immediate future, your best bet is probably to invest in paid ads or audit your site for some quick SEO fixes that will increase traffic.

Otherwise, if you can take just a slightly longer-term approach and invest the time into building a list, email marketing could easily become your most profitable channel in a matter of months.

Finally, we’ve mentioned segmentation a lot in this blog post, but that’s because it really is essential to effective email marketing campaigns.

I’d even go so far as to say that companies that give up on this channel – that think email marketing is NOT important – probably never got around to effectively segmenting their lists.

Without taking this necessary step, you could easily be sending the same email to half-a-dozen different “groups” of people.

And when does that one-size-fits-all approach ever work in marketing?

Never.

That’s why companies that take this approach with email marketing see low open rates, low clickthrough rates, and nearly nonexistent conversion rates.

…and then go on to think email marketing isn’t important and doesn’t work.

If you want to avoid this pitfall, be sure to budget for the time it will take to learn about who is actually on your email marketing list and what they want from you.

Some of this will simply come with time, too.

As you send out more emails, you’ll notice certain segments develop. You’ll see one group of subscribers gravitate to a certain type of email while others engage more with a different type of content.

So, the more you can take the time to look for these segments and create emails specifically for them, the better email marketing will work for your business.

Don’t put off getting started with email marketing. It could easily be the best decision you make for your company’s future.

If you already have a list, start with that – even if it doesn’t contain thousands of email addresses.

Then get busy building on it.

You can add forms to your website to solicit visitors’ email addresses and direct traffic to them through your social media and YouTube channels. You could also invest in lead magnets – helpful content you trade in exchange for visitors’ emails – and put them at the end of your blog posts.

Of course, you could always contact us, too.

We’ll work with you to create a customized email marketing strategy that is immediately effective at increasing your sales and turning a major profit.