Email Trumps Search and Social Media

The projected spending for email marketing is expected to soar up to 2.5 billion by the year 2016. This is a neatly wrapped “I told you so” to those skeptics who predicted email’s extinction.

Despite the rumors of disappearing application and popularity, email is alive and kicking. Actually, it seems to be thriving, even as new methods of communication arise through social media on a daily basis.

A new study has revealed that email performs better than both search and social media. Performance was based on “add to shopping cart” rates and conversations per session, on average. This isn’t to say, of course, that marketers would be wise to rely solely on mass email for their marketing efforts. Rather, it’s best to use all three services—email, search, and social media—for the best results. Why not use all the tools at hand?

Here are some statistics about marketing strategies and campaigns that can drive some new conversations about using email and the like intelligently:

• Retail email volume is up eighteen percent.
• Segmentation of email lists, or not treating everyone on the list to the same message, can have a huge impact on your results.
• Segmented email campaigns produce more openings of emails than campaigns that do not differentiate between recipients.
• Segmented email campaigns produce fifty percent more click-throughs than undifferentiated messages.
• Emailing customers that have placed items in their carts but have not completed their purchases are more successful than not in prompting more business.
• Customize your email messages based on where in the world your customers are! Consider what different holidays might be in effect, differences in currency, and even shipping options.
• When emailing non-active customers, you would be wise to include a promotion code that has a shot as reigniting their interest and enticing people who haven’t really been reading your emails.
• Make sure that the products and services featured in your email match the featured items that appear after the customer has clicked through.
• Use similar messaging and design on the landing page that continues throughout the user’s experience through checkout.
• Keep up the “scent trail”, regardless of what the inbound marketing channel is. - There has been a seventy-three percent increase in email views over iPads over the last four months.
• There has been a thirty-four percent increase in email opens on mobile devices over the last four months.
• There has been an eleven percent decrease in email opens on web-based email programs. - There has been a ten percent decrease in email opens for desktop email clients.

Based on this information, it is safe to say that investing in mass email for the mobile market is wise. People use their smartphones to check email above nearly anything else, and the smart thing to do is tap into that tendency. By personalizing and tweaking mass emails, you can easily make the technology work for you. While social media might be heralded as the replacement for email, there is no better way to connect directly than good old-fashioned email.