In 1978, Gary Thuerk launched the very first email marketing campaign, sending 400 emails via ARPANET to promote products from Digital Equipment Corporation. Since then, email has been the go-to channel for marketers to connect with customers, establish their brand, and boost sales.
The scenario has changed significantly with various modern marketing options, such as paid advertisements and social media. Therefore, you might ask yourself why you use email marketing at all. Is it still relevant?
The short answer is yes; email marketing is relevant and strong. Here are ten compelling reasons why you should also use email marketing:
1. Everyone Has Email
When advocating for PPC ads or SEO, marketers often highlight the sheer volume of Google users or the number of daily searches on the platform. The same logic applies to email.
As reported by Statista, roughly 4.5 billion people use email services worldwide. Just think about it, email is often a prerequisite when setting up a smartphone, a tablet, or even a PC. At the same time, it is also the official channel for communication in most companies.
If you are not using email, you lose the chance to find new people, keep the current audience interested, and expand the business.
Read More: Master Email Marketing for eCommerce: Top 10 Tips for Success
2. Multi-Purpose Campaigns
Email is indeed a slightly older form of communication. However, it is also a flexible option. You can utilize it to interact, entertain, and educate your readers. Brands use emails to send newsletters, promotions, updates, surveys, and more.
When you onboard a new customer, you send them a welcome email. When they don’t engage with your brand for long, you send them win-back campaigns. The possibilities are endless, whether you want to share updates or increase sales with email marketing. And the best part—all your communication reaches directly in your audiences’ inbox.
3. Boost Brand Awareness and Authority
Every email you send strengthens your brand identity. A consistent tone, design, and value-driven content build trust over time. And since customers receive these emails regularly, they start associating your brand with reliability.
For marketers, emails also create opportunities for effective campaigns that promote thought leadership—think newsletters, exclusive content, or sneak peeks into upcoming product launches.
4. Build Stronger Relationships with Personalization
Personalization is one of the mainstays of effective email campaigns. You divide your email contacts into smaller segments according to their common characteristics, like age, gender, customer lifecycle stage, etc. This enables you to customize your message to cater to the specific requirements of your varied audience.
From simply addressing recipients with their first names to sending promotional offers based on their past purchases, email marketing enables granular targeting. As a result, it helps build stronger connections and increases the chances of conversions and repeat purchases.
Read More: A Guide To Different Types of Audience Segmentation
5. Higher Engagement Rates
Nearly 99% of individuals with email accounts monitor their inboxes every day. There are people who check their emails up to 20 times daily. Since your messages go straight to your audience’s inbox, they are more likely to be opened and read.
In addition, for a customer or potential customer to receive your email, they must choose to join your email or subscriber list. This indicates that anyone who opts to receive your emails is already anticipating what you have to say. So, if your message is relevant, the audience will engage with your campaigns.
6. Subscriber List is Yours
Whether it’s an organic post or a paid ad campaign on social media, you know that you only have little control over who sees your content. It depends on algorithms and countless other factors that are hard to pinpoint.
On the contrary, email marketing runs on the subscriber list you build. You decide whether to gather contacts through lead magnets, at checkout, or through forms. Moreover, you can segment them based on traits relevant to your marketing goals. You can also periodically audit your lists to remove inactive and invalid emails. Therefore, you control exactly who receives your campaigns.
7. High Return on Investment
Emails land where it matters most—in the inbox, where people already check in daily. Email marketing has a much higher ROI than social media or paid ads. Why?
First, it’s a permission-based exercise. Your customers already opted in, signaling their interest.
Second, there’s no financial barrier to entry, unlike in PPC ads, where you must set daily budgets and bid for placements. Therefore, increasing sales with email marketing can be more cost-effective than ads.
Lastly, a well-timed, personalized email is more likely to convert than generic messaging blasted out to the masses.
All these factors result in email being a cost-effective yet advantageous marketing strategy. When done the right way, it delivers an ROI of around 4,200%, generating $42 for every dollar spent.
8. Automate to Keep Everything Running Smoothly
Like any other marketing tactic, email marketing today can be fully automated with the help of email automation platforms. With tools like Klaviyo and Mailchimp, for instance, one can effortlessly set up and send an automatic welcome series, cart abandonment reminders, and post-purchase follow-ups to keep the audience engaged without exerting extra effort.
Automation guarantees that you are always engaging your customers at the most appropriate time, thus helping you increase sales with email marketing. Additionally, it saves you time, giving you breathing space to concentrate on the more strategic growth initiatives whilst your campaigns run in the background without any hitches.
9. Measurable Outcomes
Real-time analytics is perhaps the biggest positive of email marketing. To begin with, key metrics like open rates, click-throughs, number of bounces, and conversions can be monitored in order to assess the efficiency of the campaigns sent out.
With the passage of time and an increasing number of campaigns, you will also start collecting a lot of relevant information yourself. For instance, you will understand at what times campaigns perform best, what content does well with which groups and, to put it plainly, how well different subject lines perform. This information allows you to fine-tune your approach to ensure future campaigns are more effective.
Read More: The Basics of Email Marketing KPIs: What Every Digital Marketer Should Know
10. Reach People on Their Phones
Here’s one more important thing to keep in mind regarding email marketing: Almost half of emails are opened on mobile devices. That’s because emails on phones are just one click away. Also, you receive push notifications when new emails arrive, making them hard to miss.
People are more likely to engage with emails they can access quickly without needing to wait until they get to a desktop. Time-sensitive offers—like flash sales or limited-time discounts—work especially well on mobile since they capitalize on impulse actions.
Wrapping Up
If you’re still wondering why email marketing should be used, the answer is simple: it works, and you must use it. From driving engagement with personalized communication to increasing sales through automation and data insights, email marketing is a game-changer. Not to mention, it’s cost-effective and brings greater returns, making it perfect for small businesses.
At CommerceV3, we know how to utilize the power of email to expand your business. With our email marketing services, you can run impactful campaigns that boost your sales and connect with the right audience at the right time.
Ready to turn emails into profit? Let’s get started!
