Is email marketing a thing of the past?

It use to be that all of the online gurus said that you were missing the boat if you weren’t using email marketing to grow your business. Then social media entered the scene and became all the range. I could argue that social media is still all the rage and that email marketing is dead. At least that is how I was feeling until I checked out this website.

I’m going to keep this brief today, because frankly they killed it at the EmailIsNotDead.com site and it has about all the arguments you need to make the point.

Email marketing is still a valid channel

The penetration rate is pretty high for email. There are roughly 7.5 billion people in the world. According to the website, EmailIsNotDead.com, there are right at 4 billion people with email addresses. That means that over half of the world, or 53%, has an email address. The Radicati Group pegs the growth rate of email addresses at 3% per year. That is pretty good for a older communication platform.

[caption id=”attachment_6134" align=”aligncenter” width=”1024"]

Radicati Group email growth rate by year[/caption]

What is more impactful, in my opinion, is some of the other email statistics. For example, every single day there are almost 300 million emails are sent. So, clearly people are spending time in their inbox.

Now, how does that amount of email users stack up against social media users worldwide? Pretty well, in terms of volume. According to Statista, a research resource I regularly use, there are about 3 billion social media users worldwide. Which means that for now, social media user growth is scaling faster than email, there are more email users. I suspect that is because social media users tend to use smart devices to access their platform of choice. Whereas with email you just need to find access to a computer.

Email marketing isn’t just alive, its a preferred channel for sales

Still, there is a compelling reason to keep focusing on email marketing. Particularly if you are using email marketing to reach consumers.

A report by Adobe back in 2018 found that more than 60% of consumers prefer email marketing when it comes to a brand reaching out to them.

Clearly if you are selling something then your path to consumers should include email. That includes whether or not you have a large email distribution list. The point is that email as a sales channel is clearly not dead. Think about it. Even if your click-through rate from an email is low it is still a very, very low cost marketing activity. At worst you are looking at a few hundred dollars a year for a email subscription service that includes access to landing pages and more.