December 9, 2021

5 Reasons Email Marketing Is Hot

By Brian Mahany, VP of Digital Sales, Audacy

Like Mary J. Blige, Snoop Dogg, and The Eagles, email turns 50 this year. And they’ve all still “got it.”

Over the hill. Mature. Past one’s prime. Once you hit the half-century mark, some say your best days are behind you. But that’s not true in general, and certainly not accurate with email marketing.

In 1971, a Massachusetts engineer sent a digital note from one computer to another. And so the world’s first email was born. (The content didn’t exactly set the world on fire. A test, the message read like baby talk – something along the lines of “QWERTYUIOP.”)

Five decades later, email is all grown up and leading the marketing world as one of the most effective tools in our arsenal. Four billion people use it daily, including just about every American. Next year, worldwide revenue from email marketing should reach $10 billion.

Why? Because the medium is easy to use, powerful, and most importantly, accessible from anywhere, anytime – On the go, in the living room, or at work. While headlines may declare Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok as the hot trends, 4 out of 5 marketers say they’d prefer to cut social media rather than email marketing.

Before we bring out the cake to celebrate email’s fiftieth trip around the sun, let’s look at five reasons email marketing remains effective and popular.

1

High ROI

In a bang per buck match up, email marketing is tough to beat. When emailing a house list, for every $1 invested, it creates a $42 return – an astonishing 4,200% ROI. Integrating a house list with a prospecting list is key to diversifying your strategy and reaching the largest audience. But let’s talk about prospecting email, a tactic that not everyone is taking advantage of. One that helps advertisers get their brand and message in front of people that aren’t customers yet. Here’s one example. Our Audacy team recently worked with a prospect operating in the rural South. The company was investing heavily with direct mail and was seeing decent – although diminishing – results. The current cost per lead was between $300 and $400. We were given the challenge of coming in at $200. Using advanced targeting, we crushed that goal. Our customer acquisition cost was only $91.

2

Personalization

There are lots of great ways to optimize your marketing emails, but few are as effective as creating a high-impact, 1:1 experience with readers. Email marketing can change the message’s content based upon a subscriber’s gender, location, behavior, interests, and other factors. It makes a big difference, delivering six times greater revenue results than in emails that don’t tailor to an individual.

3

Segmentation

You can use data to zero in on people by zip code, radius, education levels, or other metrics like the presence of kids in the home. And while many marketing tactics like social media platforms no longer allow you to target as precisely as you want or need, email marketing can. We’ll help you reach your ideal consumer using advanced targeting which you often can’t find using other marketing tactics.

4

Multi-Channel

Audacy has over 200 million email addresses that we obtained with either opt-in or double opt-in permission, when users accept the terms and conditions of a download or sign up. That gives us the ability to take a multichannel approach to targeting, which is fairly unique in the industry. With our online and offline data segments, we have the ability to build a consumer profile around an email address. Once the profile is built out, that individual will receive an email, be served up your adds on their Facebook newsfeed & on Instagram, and see it when they visit websites that they are most active on. That multi-tactic approach to deliver messages allows us to establish frequency across many platforms to the same person receiving the email, raising effectiveness.

5

Lead Generator

The majority of brands think of email as a branding strategy. But it works great as a lead gen product, if used the right way. Smart usage of email can help you reach new customers and reactivate lapsed ones.

With frequency, targeting the right audience multiple times, email can deliver strong lead gen results, whether for website conversions, form fills, or some other call to action. We help companies target the right people at the right time with the right message to get that conversion.

As we blow out the candles and sing “Happy Birthday” to email marketing, remember that the big 5-0 is just a number. Like The Eagles, Mary J. Blige, and Snoop Dogg, email isn’t just getting older, it’s getting better.