Still doing the same thing? Or adapting with your audience?
With increasing emphasis being put on social media, chatbots, paid advertising and other initiatives, is email marketing still a worthwhile channel for engaging your customers and prospects? Some analysis released by HubSpot earlier this year thinks it’s still up there as a worthwhile marketing strategy.
Here are the highlights:
Top Email Marketing stats for 2020
- There are almost 4 billion daily users of email and the number is expected to climb to 4.3 billion by 2023.
- Mobile accounts for 46% of email opens with 35% of business professionals regularly checking email on a mobile device.
- 73% of millennials prefer business communications to come via email.
- 80% of business professionals believe that email increases customer retention.
- 78% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement of the last 12 months.
- 31% of B2B marketers say that email newsletters are the best way to retain customers.
- 81% of B2B marketers say their most common form of content marketing is via email newsletters.
- Marketers using segmentation and targeted campaigns note as much as a 760% in revenue.
- 59% of respondents say marketing emails influence their purchase decisions.
- 16% of all emails never make it in to the inbox.
Our key email marketing takeaways
Jumping right out of the above list is the use of email marketing newsletters and segmentation.
If 31% of B2B marketers say that email newsletters are the best way to retain customers, then why are 81% of marketers using them? Here is what we suspect:
- creating an distributing email newsletters is a well-formed habit, ‘we’ve always done it that way’
- email marketing platforms always provide a newsletter template and so it get’s used
- newsletters are an opportunity to say everything at once in a single email and hope that something in the list resonates with the recipient
- email newsletters are often quite pretty to look at
- email newsletters can be automated (picking up content from a website or blog) and scheduled in advance
- they are a convenient form of marketing for the sender
The point on segmentation challenges all of this (the use of the newsletters) directly.
What do we mean by segmentation?
Email marketing segmentation is all about sending relevant content to people that are most likely to be interested in it. And at the right time too.
To this you are categorising your audience and putting them in to dedicated lists and categorising your content in the same way. In addition, applying some research in to the best time (day of week and hour) to send that content and the best format to send it in. It could still be a newsletter, but with content aligned to the audience.
Regularly managing these lists and looking at engagement means you can adjust your lists, removing those who haven’t shown interest and adding those that have.
It’s no wonder companies deploying segmented/targeted campaigns are receiving as much as a 760% increase in revenue.
References:
- The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2020 (HubSpot)
- Number of e-mail users worldwide 2017-2024 (Statista)
- The New Rules of Email Marketing (Campaign Monitor)
- Email Marketing Strategy in 2020 (HubSpot/Litmus)
- B2B Content Marketing 2020 (Content Marketing Institute)
- Email Deliverability – Best tools (Email ToolTester)
- Email Client Market Share trend 2018 (Litmus)
