Business owners and marketers can be like children with toys when it comes to trying new tactics. As soon as something newer and shinier comes around, there’s a temptation to forget about older techniques that were once the rage. This has been the case with email marketing. As mobile marketing and social media marketing take center stage, it’s important to remember that email marketing is still an essential part of an integrated marketing plan. Here are 10 recent statistics that show the value that email marketing still has for business owners.
There were 3.6 billion email accounts in 2013 and it is estimated that the number will reach 4.3 billion by 2016.
According to ExactTarget research, 91 percent of consumers reported checking their email at least once a day. This makes email is the most consistently used internet marketing channel available.
Epsilon reported that the average clickthrough rate for B2B marketing emails in the second quarter of 2013 was 1.7 percent. This is actually pretty amazing because the average click through rate for all banner ads in the U.S. is only 0.1 percent.
Two out of three (66 percent) of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of an email marketing message, according to the Direct Marketing Association.
A Merkle white paper found that 74 percent of consumers prefer to receive commercial communications via email.
For B2B marketers, email marketing is a no-brainer. B2B emails achieved the highest open rates at 27.97 percent according to eConsultancy.
Also showing the power of email marketing for B2B, a recent study showed that 40 percent of B2B marketers rated the leads generated by email marketing house lists as high quality.
Consumers also like commercial emails. According to a report from Litmus, 82 percent of consumers open email from companies.
According to ExactTarget, many consumers subscribe to opt-in lists. They reported that 93% of consumers also get at least one permission-based email daily.
Smartphones have exponentially increased the value of email marketing. According to Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, the average person checks their smartphone 34 times a day. And one study estimated that 64% of decision-makers read their email via mobile devices.
The above statistics show that there’s plenty of life left in email marketing, and in fact, as mobile marketing grows in importance, email marketing will become a major tool used by companies to communicate with consumers. For those who have had troubles with email marketing in the past, these numbers show why it’s important to get back on the horse and try again. With so much value at stake, business owners need to do whatever’s necessary to find the best practices and tactics for their business. For those who put their email marketing toys away, it’s time to bring them out of the box.