If we asked you right now if email deliverability is important for your business’s reputation, you’d likely give us a resounding “YES.”
While email deliverability is important, so are other parts of your email marketing, including the role it plays in reducing your marketing spend and increasing ROI.
Simply put, email marketing is one of the best ways to decrease the share of your marketing spend as a percentage of your overall revenue. Reducing this share will increase the profitability of your business, and if you do this in a sustainable way by focusing on building your email lists, your revenue won’t take a hit.
There are several compelling reasons why email marketing helps decrease marketing spend and boost your profitability, such as:
- You have more control over your email and user data. You can’t get this from social media, and instead have to pay these platforms to even reach users.
- You can spend less on paid media and advertising in the long-term. Just like with social media, you can reduce your overall advertising spend if you focus on getting leads onto your list.
- You have a better chance of boosting your revenue through email. Studies show email marketing converts better than most paid media, so it needs to be a primary focus for your business.
Let’s look at these three reasons in more detail below.
You Own Your Leads and Email Data
Think about this: when your business gets a new Facebook Page like, or a new Twitter follower, or a new Instagram follower, who “owns” that person’s information?
Simply put, those social platforms control their users’ data. You have no right of access to it on a granular level.
In many cases, this means your social media efforts can only be as targeted as the platforms let you. If you want to reach more consumers, you need to pay to reach them based on the limitations and requirements of those platforms.
Unfortunately, when you rely too heavily on other platforms to generate leads for you, you give up two essential things:
- The access to and management of information for potential email subscribers
- The ability to monetize these potential subscribers directly from your company’s site and/or email marketing
Despite the popularity of social media, email is still one of the most effective marketing formats available to your business. For example, MarketingSherpa discovered 60% of consumers want to receive updates and promotions from brands via email, compared to only 20% who prefer to follow them on social media.
Additionally, OptinMonster found engagement rates are significantly higher on email marketing. Email averages a 22.86% open rate and a 3.71% click-through rate, versus an 0.58% average engagement rate across Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Clearly, it’s in your best interest to get more subscribers on your email list than it is to have followers and likes across your social media channels, which can at any time choose to charge you to reach more users or even adjust their algorithms to take organic attention off your brand.
In short, running your own email marketing campaigns gives you significantly more control over subscribers’ data and your leads. This in turn helps you reduce your marketing costs by not pumping money and time into other platforms that may have bad ROI.
Plus, you could potentially see higher sales, too! We’ll go into more detail on this later.
You Reduce Your Reliance on Paid Media
For many marketers, paid media and advertising is the way to go when you want to generate leads. However, it can also be an expensive method of attracting new customers.
Let’s look at pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns on Google, for example. One report estimates that a typical small business in America can spend an average of $9000 USD per month on PPC per month. And businesses in competitive industries like insurance, education, and law can spend up to $40-$50 million USD per year!
In general, paid media and advertising isn’t a sustainable way to generate leads. It only gets you the attention of customers when you put money into those specific channels, and is short-lived in terms of overall marketing impact.
This is why email marketing is so important. You can reduce your reliance on paid media and similar pay-to-play channels by using that method to acquire users once before moving them to your email lists and excluding those users from your advertising campaigns.
Essentially, when you win a customer as a lead via paid media and move them to your owned-and-operated email list, you no longer need to pay a company like Facebook or Google again each time you want to advertise to that same customer.
It’s now relatively “free” for you to continue to market to them via email (besides any costs that come with running your email marketing, of course).
Another benefit of email over paid media is that a solid email marketing strategy helps in times of uncertainty, like during Covid-19, for example. You can dial back on marketing spend while still being able to reach your customers and push sales.
Savings without sacrificing reach seems like a no-brainer to us!
You Sell More When Communicating Directly with Consumers
As we noted earlier, owning your email list gives you more control over user data and reduces your need to spend unnecessarily on other platforms like YouTube and Facebook. And as an added bonus, email marketing is more likely to help you sell more, too!
Consider these stats from a 2015 study from the Data & Marketing Association (DMA), for example:
- Email marketers saw an average of £38 in sales for each £1 spent (roughly $50 USD for every $1:33). This is an ROI of 38:1, or 3800%.
- One in five companies surveyed for the study reported an ROI of over 70:1.
- Segmented and targeted emails generated 58% of all revenue.
When the DMA conducted another study in 2019, they found the average ROI of email marketing had jumped to 42:1, or 4200%.
Consumers are influenced to further interact with your company and even make purchases based on the types of emails they get from you. The DMA found 63% of email subscribers like to receive discounts, 59% say good emails contain offers, and 47% are willing to share their email in exchange for discounts.
Basically, the more you use email marketing, the more likely you are to see a positive return on your investment. This means you can spend less on other marketing efforts, thereby reducing your share of marketing spend and boosting your overall revenue.
By now, you can clearly see the value of email marketing as a way to increase profitability across your business. If you’ve already set up campaigns but want to improve your email deliverability (and therefore your chances of higher revenue) over the next few months, check out our complete guide to email deliverability for 2021.
Here’s to a more profitable year!
