It is surprising how often email is overlooked as a marketing tool. Perhaps due to how old email actually is, pre-dating the world wide web by over a decade. In fact, the effectiveness of email marketing can probably be attributed to being invented at a university, and in a time before social media platforms began to dominate the internet.
Today, the social media tech giants charge users for posting content, limiting the number of people who can read it if you post organically, to avoid advertising fees. On Facebook, the more you pay, the more people can see your content.
Email on the other hand, was invented long before the now ubiquitous monetisation of digital content.
Origins
Invented by M.I.T. student Dr Shiva Ayyadurai in 1978, email wasn’t designed to charge the user for sending or receiving emails, and this never changed. This is probably why there are still more email users today than social media users.
According to research posted by OptinMonster in 2019, there are 3.8 billion email users, compared with 3.4 billion social media users.
Also, MarketingSherpa commissioned an online survey in 2015, asking users how they preferred to receive regular updates and promotions. The most popular choice was email, in which 60% of respondents chose it as their favourite. Only 20% of respondents chose social media as their favourite way to receive promotions.
This is one of the reasons why email marketing is still considered a primary marketing tool by large and small businesses alike. It enables businesses to engage with their target audience directly, without these communications being controlled and metered by a third party. Here are some key benefits of email marketing:
Targeted Reach: By building an email list, you can reach your customers directly, without having to rely on other channels, like social media standing between you and your customers. This enabled you to deliver highly targeted messages to your customers, based on their interests and behaviours.
Maintaining Customer Information: If you have built a website that ranks highly in Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), and Google adjusts its algorithm resulting in your website dropping in the SERPs from a highly ranked position to a lower ranked position, this typically results in a significant loss of traffic. This is the downside of only using SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) to build traffic. However, if you have used your website to attract customers to subscribe to your email list while your website still ranked highly in the SERPs, then you still have a list of existing subscribers to contact and sell to.
Cost-Effective: Unlike other marketing channels, such as print or television advertising, email marketing is relatively inexpensive, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes. The largest expense is typically your subscription to an email marketing service. I recommend that you use this kind of service because it will have important built in features, like the ability for your subscribers to unsubscribe from your list or adjust their subscription settings, and this will help you adhere to strict data protection laws. You must not prevent a subscriber from unsubscribing from your email list if this is what they want to do.
Measurable Results: Using email marketing software, you can track the success of your campaigns in real-time, enabling you to make adjustments and improvements as needed. This helps you to squeeze the most out of your marketing efforts and maximise your ROI (return on investment).
Increased Engagement: By delivering targeted messages to customers, you can more easily encourage them to take specific actions, such as purchasing a product or service, and offer special promotions. This can help you build stronger relationships with your subscribers and achieve customer loyalty.
Research and Personalisation: Once you have captured your subscriber’s emails, you can survey them to learn more about their preferences and interests. These responses can often reveal information that you may have not previously considered. This new information can give you ideas about new products or services that you hadn’t originally planned to offer.
Higher Conversion Rates: Thanks to its ability to garner information from subscribers, email marketing has been shown to have higher conversion rates compared to other marketing channels. This enables you to send far more focused communications, promoting products or services more closely aligned to your subscriber’s interests. This results in achieving a much higher click/open rate on the hyperlinks in your promotional emails, giving you a better ROI from your marketing efforts.
By providing targeted reach, measurable results, increased engagement, improved customer relationships, and higher conversion rates, email marketing is more effective for building a business compared to building a large website consisting of a large number of web pages and not capturing email addresses from visitors. It has also proven to be cost-effective. By investing in email marketing, businesses can reach their target audience, build strong relationships with their customers, and achieve their marketing goals.
Email Newsletters
Building an email list is not just a useful method for existing businesses and entrepreneurs to engage with their customers, the Email Newsletter has also proven to be a standalone business model. And they have been successfully utilised for both B2C (Business to Customer) and B2B (Business to Business) models alike.
Some of the most successful newsletters generate millions of dollars a year in revenue. For example, in 2014 Sam Parr started an email newsletter called The Hustle. He began sending just two or three emails a week.
When he managed to build his list to 75,000 / 80,000 subscribers, he attracted advertisers who paid $1,000 USD per advert. After running The Hustle for three years, the subscribers had grown to 1 million people. By February 2021 he sold The Hustle to another company, Hubspot, for $17.2 million (1).
The Perils of Pure SEO
Many internet marketers have gone down the well trodden road of building multi-page websites, trying too post as much content as possible, in the hope of achieving web visitors from Google searches. Each web page has to be optimised by including keywords (search terms) that people are typing into Google while looking for information. These keywords first have to be discovered by using keyword research tools. The science of successfully incorporating keywords to web pages is referred to as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
However, there are problems experienced by people and companies who have used only SEO, and have neglected building an email list.
Since Google was born and unleashed onto the internet, it quickly became the number one search engine, due to its ability to crawl through the content of web pages and better understand the topic of the web pages. This enabled Google to provide better SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) than its competitors.
Google’s search engine crawler (spider) that crawls through (scans) the many millions of web pages across the internet is called GoogleBot. What determines how the crawled data is processed or interpreted is Google’s algorithm. This is the code that helps Google understand the data it has crawled from the many websites. Visitors to Google most commonly click on the top ranking websites in the SERPs, with less visitors clicking on the lower ranking websites further down the page. These lower ranking websites therefore receive less visitors / traffic.
In order to continue providing good quality SERPs and stay ahead of the competition, Google has frequently updated its algorithm. These updates have changed how websites or web pages have ranked in its SERPs under different keywords (search terms). This has boosted the ranking (and traffic) for some websites, but lowered the ranking (and traffic) of others.
If your website drops in the rankings of Google’s SERPs, it can potentially lose all of its traffic. This can, and often has, decimated a companies revenue overnight. Businesses that have relied purely on SEO to rank on Google, without taking the opportunity to build an email list while their website ranked well in the SERPs, have ended up with no information about their customers or potential customers, and therefore have no-one to contact and sell to.
In conclusion, building a large website while neglecting capturing email addresses from web visitors can very risky. With traffic from Google and other search engines, you don’t own and control this. With email marketing, you own and therefore exercise more control over your list of subscribers. You cannot lose your email list overnight due to an algorithm update released by Google or a social media platform. A large website might also be expensive to create and maintain, often due to the need for added security, especially if it takes credit card payments. It may also not provide the same level of engagement and conversion.
Sources:
(1) https://theygotacquired.com/podcast/sam-parr-the-hustle