Is Email Marketing Dead? A Complete Guide (2023)

Apr 10

Heres the short answer…No! I won’t make you read this whole article shrouded in mystery. Email marketing is very much still “alive” and a great marketing channel to use to deliver content to your audience.

You may be asking “So why do some people say it is dead then?” and thats a great question! There are a lot of reasons why some business owners feel like it’s time to ditch email as part of their marketing strategy and a big part of it has to do with content delivery. In the “social first” world that we live in now, many people are giving marketing preference to videos and app based content, two things that do not translate well to email.

You may have already figured out that your Youtube videos and Shorts can be reused as Reels on Instagram. Those Reels on Instagram can be reused on your brand’s Tiktok. Twitter post can be screenshot and used as feed post and pictures on Linkedin and Instagram. You can repurpose a lot of online content across many channels however, alone, none of this content will work in email. For this reason, many marketer want to move away from email in favor of platforms that work well with the content they are already creating.

The issue with this is that email is in a whole separate lane than your other channels. Email marketing should never be seen as optional and should instead be looked at as a way to enhance your other campaigns. There are very few campaigns you should be running that do not include some form of email marketing. From direct sales to getting more engagement on your content, email can help you achieve your camping goals.

If you can not tell by now, in this article I will not only share with you why I think email marketing is here to stay, but we will also talk about how you can utilize email to grow your business.

Email Marketing Benchmarks

One the the tricky things with email marketing is that all of the metrics are completely different than the ones that many business owners are used to today.

We are all familiar with likes, comments, shares, retweets, and saves. Even on different channels these things all mean the same thing. When it comes to email marketing metrics we are not looking for app engagement we are monitoring things like open rate, click rate, and sales attributions.

If you do not have any previous history with email marketing it can be hard to know what is a “good” result when you send out an email blast to your subscriber list. While I am I firm believer that there is no “bad” result, let's take a moment to go over some of the average emails marketing metrics to target for you email campaigns .

Delivery Rate

The average email delivery rate across all industries is 92.1%.

Your delivery rate describes the number of people who received your emails. Sometimes you have incorrect email addresses in your system which causes some emails to bounce back. You can calculate the delivery rate by dividing number of emails received by the total number of emails sent.

Open Rate

The average email open rate across all industries is 30.1%

You open rate is the percentage people who received your email and opened it after you sent it. You can calculate your open rate by dividing the number of opened emails by the total number of emails delivered.

Click Rate

The average email click rate across all industries is 1.42

You email cite rate is the percentage of people who click on at least one link within your email. This can be a link to your homepage, a product, an article on your site, or even to a website that is not your own. You can calculate your email click rate by dividing the number of unique clicks by the total number of delivered emails.

Please note, there is a difference between click rate and click-to-open-rate “CTOR”. The CTOR compares your number of emails clicks to the amount of people who opened the email, not the number of delivered emails. You calculate your CTOR by dividing the number of unique clicks by the number of email opens.

Email personalization

One of the amazing things about digital marketing is the ability to customize your message for each person viewing your content. This is especially true when it comes to email marketing. When you personalize your email strategy you’ll often see higher open rates and overall better engagement across your campaigns.

A lot of people are now familiar with personalizing emails by using the subscriber name in the subject line or in the body of the email. However did you know that with email marketing personalization can go even further!?

You can personalize your email campaigns by using other customer data outside of name information. This can include personalizing your email list by user action, location, or even depending on things they previously purchased.

Here are a few ways you can take your email personalization to the next level:

For e-commerce, send emails to people featuring items they have viewed in your online store but have not yet purchased.
Send follow up emails to people who downloaded ebooks, guides, or other content on your website with additional information or resources specific to the subject they downloaded.
If memberships are apart of your brand, you can send branded anniversary emails to your subscribers for important dates. You can make this more impactful by including social sharing options in the email.
After a purchase, send customers more information or a how-to guide about the item they just bought.
If your company takes appointments you can send an email after someone books to tell them how they can get prepared for the upcoming call.
When you choose the sender name for your email campaigns, you can add a little personalization by sending emails from a person instead of your brand. You can use a full name or try something like “Angelou from Jacker” as the sender name.

This is just a short list of how you can personalize your email campaigns to get better performance. There is a growing list of ways that you can deliver individual messages to your audience. With dynamic content you can even add personalized sections to email blast to your entire subscriber list.

Making It Easy With Automations

One of the downfalls of email marketing is the time commitment that it takes. This can be especially hard for solopreneurs and small teams. Sending regular email blast and sales-based emails can monopolize hours or your time. This is why I am such a fanboy of email automations.

Building automated series for your email campaigns can ensure that all of subscribers are getting regular correspondence from your brand without you having to send all the content manually. The best thing is that the recipient usually does not know that the emails are set to trigger atomically and still feel like they are being communicated with directly.

So what is email automation? Simply put email automation is the process of setting up emails to send based off specific actions taken by users. This can be after they subscribe to your mailing list, after an online purchase, after they fill out a form on your website, or a host of other things.

You can take your email automations further by sending not just one email but a series of emails, spread out across several days or weeks. Using email series usually has much better results than sending just one email. Series also allow users to receive a bunch of emails from your brand without you having to send daily or even weekly blast.

The amazing thing about automated email series is that you only need to set them up one time. After set up, these systems can be used to send hundreds of emails without ever having to touch the system again. This can free up a lot of time and work in the background to nurture your leads and even make sales for your business.

Here are a few automations that you can utilize for your brand to help move customers through your conversion funnels:

Welcome Series:

This set of emails is sent after a visitor first subscribes to your email list on your website. This can be through something like a pop up or through a subscription block.

Your welcome series is a great way to warm up new subscribers. It gets them used to receiving emails from your brand and allows you to collect initial data on the user. It’s important to use this as an opportunity to tell people a little bit about your brand. Give them your “why” and tell them a little more about business before asking for a sale.

If you use an email system with conditional sending, it is a good idea to have the system check and see if the subscriber recently made a purchase before sending an offer. If they have, you don’t want to ask them to do the same thing, instead this is a good opportunity to get an up sell or push a related product/service.

Review Series:

Reviews are very important to collect for your business and can help sway potential customers to purchase. Use this set of emails to find users who are willing to review their recent purchase and direct them to your preferred review platform using links in the email.

One common mistake people make when setting up review automation is sending the emails too soon. Make sure you give time for the product to arrive and the customer to use it, or the service to be complete, before asking for a review.

Sale Series:

Using email automation can be a great way to run sales for an e-commerce brand that will allow you to get more conversions while saving time by contacting your email subscribers atomically throughout the sale.

One trick to getting the most out of your sale series is to send the first email before your sale starts. This gets your audience ready and allows you to focus only on your subscribers who have shown interest.

There are many different combinations of timing and the different content you can send in this series however the important part with this series is to use conditional filters that allow you to stop the series after the subscriber makes a purchase. This protects the integrity of your list and ensures no one feels like they are being spammed with emails.

It’s All About Timing

When it comes to optimizing your email campaigns one of the important things you should pay attention to is what time you are sending your email blast. This one thing can have a big effect on the open rate of your campaign, which affects how many clicks you will get.

It may be obvious to some people to not send emails at 2am however, for some brands, sending emails at 9am can be just as bad! You want to not only think about when your customers will be awake but you want to try and match your email message to their natural behavior. It’s not enough to simply send the email.

For instance, if your data tells you that most of your customers are shopping your brand in the evening, you may want to time your emails to go out later in the day, right before they usually purchase. Same if you are targeting people who who typically work 9-5. You want to send emails about food when people are likely to be hungry, and send emails with blogs when you notice they like to read. If you are unsure of what the best time to send emails are, follow your data.

One hack I use when sending emails is to try avoiding sending out blast on the hour or half hour mark. Instead of sending at 10:30 opt for something like 10:47. Many brands and big companies send out emails on the hour benchmarks. By sending your emails a little off at odd times you can make sure your emails do not get bunched together with other emails coming in at the same time. This can help your brand’s emails be at the top of the list and stand out.

Email send times go further than just what time you send emails, you should also optimize your campaigns around what day to send your emails. People have different routines during different times of the week and this is often reflected in email open behavior.

For example, people in the travel industry report that most customers book travel on Tuesdays, so if you were marketing travel related product/services you might want to structure your campaigns to send Monday night or Tuesday morning. Similarly, if you work in real estate, you may want to send out information about open houses on Fridays and Saturdays as most open houses are on Sunday.

Structuring your email campaigns for peak performance is all about getting your emails in front of people when they are most likely open then. The trick to this is to send emails that are properly timed to the receiver’s purchasing behavior.

Test Everything!

Whenever I hear someone say “email marketing is dead” or that “email marketing doesn’t work” the first thing I think is “well you just didn’t do enough test!”

Just like other aspects of digital marketing, it is important to test out different parts of your campaign so that you can learn and optimize future campaigns. If you are getting poor open rates it may indicate that you a sending your emails at the wrong time. If your sales based emails are not converting it may indicate that you need to send MORE emails with a longer funnel before asking for the sale.

Many email platforms allow you to do A/B test for your campaigns where you send a different version of the same email to different portions of your email list. The data results like which group opened more, which group clicked specific things, and which group took more desired actions can provide you insight on how to structure your future emails.

Here are a few test you should consider running:

Try sending emails at different times to see what time results in the best open rate for your subscribers.
Use different variations of subjects to see what style resonates best with your audience.
Try using your subscriber’s name in the subject line to see if that has an effect of the open rate.
Use different placements within the body of your emails to see where you should place your offers to get the most clicks.
Try using emojis to see if that makes any of your metics better. You can use them in the subject, preview text, and/or the email body.
If you publish blogs and articles try testing out putting the whole article in the email, putting part article with a “read more” link, or just putting a summary of what the article is about to see which one results in the most engagement.

Just like the title of this section says, you can and should literally test everything! Optimizing your email campaigns never stops and you never know which thing may result in dramatic changes to your open and click rates.

When running test, remember to focus on just one thing at a time. If you are testing subject lines at the same time as email length, it may be hard for you to tell which thing had the effect on your results.

Conclusion

I said it before and I’ll say it again, email marketing is not dead and it is here to stay. Email marketing has one of the highest ROI out of any digital marketing channel with some people reporting that it returns $33 for every $1 spent.

Email marketing is usually cheaper than advertising through Google or on social media and takes less time than SEO. Email is great because it allows you to communicate directly with your customer and prospects in a way that they are familiar with.

Almost all brands can utilize email marketing and with a growing number of service providers it's now easier than ever to send email blast and set up automations. Before investing in a pricey email system, check with your web host provider to see if there is already a build in email marketing system. Site builders like Shopify and Squarespace allow you to start using email marketing for a low cost without having to sign up for a separate program or do any integrations.

Is Email Marketing Dead? A Complete Guide (2023)