Why Email Marketing Will Always be Strong

Brian Clark, the founder of and lead contributor to the popular Copyblogger website,

recently created an article that lists several reasons why email marketing is still an effective and popular marketing technique for modern businesses. Many business marketers have abandoned email because they believed that consumers were too inundated with advertisement email. This inundation was believed to have rendered email marketing completely ineffective.

What some marketers are discovering, however, is that consumers are still reading their email messages from brands and businesses. As long as the email content has a reputation for being valuable and worthwhile, consumers are willing to take five minutes to scan an email and respond to the contents contained therein. In fact, email marketing will always be a strong and profitable method of marketing a brand’s services and products to a large population of consumers. The content and subject lines of email marketing have changed considerably over the years, but the basic concept of using email as a marketing technique remains the same.

There are many reasons why email marketing continues to be a strong marketing force in the modern world, and there are also a few tips that brands can use to ensure that emails are getting opened, read, and passed on to other interested consumers. Understanding the power of email marketing and incorporating subtle changes into your email campaign can create vast profits with very little effort.

Email is Personal

The biggest reason why email marketing continues to represent a successful and valuable branch of a brand’s marketing campaign is the personal nature of an email. Unlike other marketing strategies, email allows a brand to communicate directly to individual consumers. Email messages can be tailored to target different demographics of consumers, and the best emails used for marketing purposes read like personal messages from friends.

While social media is considered by many to be the leading marketing platform in existence today, many consumers still feel like social media marketing is impersonal and generic and conversion on real products and services is usually low. With social media, brands try to target large populations of consumers. Communication is rarely direct or personal. Businesses, instead, must rely on captivating posts to draw consumers to them. With email, on the other hand, the brand is responsible for reaching consumers on a very direct and personal level. Brands that send emails to specific consumers and offer special discounts, coupons, and information on the latest products will make their customers feel important and prioritized.

Email is Efficient

Another reason why email continues to be an effective marketing strategy is the absolute efficiency that email boasts. Email costs very little to create and send, and businesses can invest saved money into other marketing avenues. The key to a successful email marketing campaign involves the list of consumers who are targeted and the content of the email.

It does cost money to develop a successful email list, but once this list is created, it can be maintained well by consistently offering high quality content to consumers. If your email marketing campaign is incredibly valuable to the customers who receive it, they will recommend that their friends and acquaintances sign up to receive emails from your brand. This takes the consumer search process of your hands and saves your business money.

Developing high quality content for your email campaign also requires an investment of time and money, but the cost of creating content for emails is often much lower than the cost of creating content for print advertisements, TV and radio spots, and even social media management.

Consumers Using Email More Frequently

Email marketing will continue to regain popularity as more and more businesses realize just how frequently consumers are using and checking their email accounts. Some businesses believe that email’s popularity has passed and that consumers are using social media accounts to send messages to friends, colleagues, and family members. In fact, the opposite is true. While email usage dipped in the past, its popularity is actually increasing amongst all major demographics. Email is making a comeback, and businesses must be prepared to take advantage of this resurgence in popularity.

Mobile Email Apps Make Email More Accessible

One of the reasons why email is becoming more popular and more frequently accessed is the creation of mobile email applications that can be used on a mobile smart phone. With a mobile phone, consumers don’t feel the need to log into a personal computer to view their email. Many smart phones integrate email with other applications on the phone, and consumers are able to quickly check their incoming messages via their personal mobile device.

Because email is so accessible through a mobile device, email marketing’s effectiveness is on the rise. When a business sends an email blast to its customers, that business can expect a large percentage of the recipients to access and read the email within minutes.

Valuable Time Exchanged for Valuable Content

Still, businesses must realize that a successful email marketing campaign is being operated under the principle of value exchange. Consumers are willing to offer their valuable time to a brand or company, but the consumer expects to receive something of value in return. Businesses must ensure that the value of the content contained within the email is high quality, pertinent information that will assist the customer in a unique and immediate way. If the consumer reads several emails that are uninteresting or irrelevant, he or she may be inclined to delete emails without reading them in the future. Worse yet, some consumers go so far as to unsubscribe from email lists if they believe that emails from a brand are clogging up an inbox rather than offering valuable information and content.

Email marketing has changed dramatically in the past five years, but it has not lost its effectiveness at generating consumer interest, developing brand loyalty, and driving profits up. The key to effective email marketing is to provide valuable content to consumers on a regular basis, find the perfect level of email frequency, and ensure that consumers are anticipating, rather than dreading, your next email contact.

Sign up in our newsletter and learn valuable ways to prosper and make money online in 2013 with David Anderson Wealth