We noticed recently how hard it was to convince some of our partners to send email at all. So this is about why email marketing matters on a company's commercial journey, and what it actually returns.
The figures below apply to email sent with consent, in line with data protection law. Before you start keeping in touch with customers by email, read the rules that govern your own market: in the European Union that is the GDPR, in Türkiye the KVKK, in the United States the CAN-SPAM Act.
Email marketing
We covered email marketing briefly in our piece on the nine types of digital marketing; this article goes into it properly.
Email marketing runs on the technology that lets people and organizations send and receive messages electronically, at addresses of the form [email protected].
Email statistics
Did you know there are more than three times as many email accounts as Facebook and Twitter accounts put together? Or that you are six times likelier to get a click from an email than from Twitter?
You have probably run into this figure already:
- For every 1 US dollar you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of 42 dollars ( DMA , 2019)
A 42 fold return, in other words. That research puts email well ahead of a good many other kinds of digital marketing.
Email marketing matters to any good advertiser
A good marketer knows this one by heart:
- Recent figures show that up to 87 percent of marketers use email marketing to distribute their content ( CMI , 2020)
The CMI research shows how far email marketing has spread among marketers who get results.
The email marketing market keeps growing
Statista keeps publishing genuinely useful figures on email marketing. Some of them:
- Ad spending in the global email advertising market is expected to reach a market volume of around 9.96 billion euros in 2024.
- By 2029 that is forecast to reach 12.08 billion euros, which corresponds to an expected annual growth of 3.93 percent (CAGR 2024-2029).
- Average ad spending per user in the email advertising market is expected to be 1.59 euros in 2024.
- Across the global comparison, the United States is expected to generate the highest email advertising revenue in 2024 (3,105.00 million euros).
- In the global advertising market, email is trending towards personalized and interactive campaigns.
We read email mostly on our phones
Other research on email marketing shows that most of us read our mail on a mobile device.
- Mobile opens fluctuate a little through the year, but 42 percent of all email is read on a smartphone or a tablet, which makes mobile the most popular place to read email. ( Litmus , 2019)
What decides whether an email gets opened
What matters most in sending an email? The subject line, the right message to the right person and content shaped around them. Of those, the subject line comes first.
- Emails with a personalized subject line lift open rates by 26 percent. ( CampaignMonitor , 2019)
- 47 percent of recipients open an email on the strength of the subject line alone. ( OptinMonster , 2021)
B2C receives 3 times more email than B2B
B2C send volume is almost three times the B2B figure, and it takes up a large share of the market.
- A B2B audience received an average of three emails a month. For B2C recipients the frequency was almost three times higher, at an average of eight a month. ( InxMail , 2021)
Email for abandoned baskets
For an online shop the hardest problem is reminding the people who walked away at the basket. Google Ads has plenty of settings for exactly that. But it is not only Google Ads: those people are worth reaching through PPC and social media too. And email works remarkably well here.
- 34 percent of abandoned basket emails end in a purchase. ( OmniSend , 2021)
How we think email marketing should be done
If you want email to be a real line to your audience, these are the points we press hardest at Türk SEM.
- Send only to a list that opted in
- Make it easy for people to unsubscribe
- Segment your newsletter
- Send mail that is relevant to the person receiving it
- Personalize it
- Write in a voice that is warm and human
- Give people a reason to reply and to engage
You have 8 seconds of attention
The average adult attention span is about 8 seconds, and there is no reason email should do better. It may be shorter; it will not be longer. So if you catch someone's attention inside those first 8 seconds, the email has a chance of doing its job.
If a customer has been looking at something for a particular electric car, an email about that car, personalized and carrying real information, does more than a plain "buy this" pitch. Something along the lines of: a streaming service has just arrived on that model's infotainment system and comes free for the first year, with three accessories for the same model underneath.
Send nothing but advertising and people stop reading you at some point. Send mail written for them, with something useful inside, and the quality of your list goes up.
Choosing images
Heavy use of images is rare in email, for several reasons. The main one is that the reader usually has to click "show images" before any of them appear. An email drowning in images is likely to lose the game inside those first 8 seconds.
Use images sparingly and deliberately. Instead of piling them up, use the persuasive voice we described in magnetic marketing.
Email marketing agency
Türk SEM works mainly in SEO and Google Ads, but our natural range covers whichever kind of digital marketing the job calls for. Influencer marketing when a café or a restaurant needs it; email marketing when a hotel wants its past guests to hear about a campaign.
Sticking to a single kind of marketing rarely works. For it to work at all, at least three kinds have to run at the same time.
We set up the email marketing infrastructure for you on a subdomain such as newsletter.example.com. The infrastructure itself runs on Amazon servers through our Amazon agency membership.
