Email Marketing - Yay or Nay?

Conservative estimates say that approximately 400 trillion emails have been sent in just the last four years, which says something about how effective a marketing tool emails are. Read on to find out if email marketing is the right strategy for your business.

Emails have been sent out with attachments almost since the inception of the internet. Since the 80s, the purpose and method in which attachments are sent out have transformed.

Email attachments have become a great marketing tool for sending out information and informing potential customers about a new brand or a product line.

While attachments are a seemingly age-old method of communication, they are incredibly relevant in the marketing landscape even today. There is damning evidence of low open rates on desktops, which may be because more users access their emails on mobile devices.

With the COVID-19 situation worldwide, the use of the internet and its facilities has only increased. The tendency to check emails and the need to stay up to date has increased.

This report looks into how email attachments are a vital tool for marketing and provides an insightful analysis of how they impact marketers.

10 Important Email Marketing Tips

Data is key to understanding anything these days, and it isn’t any different when it comes to emails and attachments. With reportedly 300 billion emails being sent out worldwide, and a prediction of about 4.3 billion email users by 2023, emails aren’t going anywhere.

While the average percentage of emails opened on desktop computers isn’t that high, more than 55% of all emails are opened on mobile devices. That number is a few years old, yet the trend is quite clear.

With the number of mobile phone users increasing and the internet becoming increasingly accessible and more necessary to everyone, the share of emails as a method of communication is huge.

Marketers can send out millions of emails a day, but the numbers don’t matter. The key focus should be on what the open and conversion rates are. Let’s get to that in a little bit.

First, let’s run through a few statistics to get a clearer understanding:

• Numbers from a few years ago suggest that about half of the emails received by an average user are considered spam. Now that doesn’t sound very optimistic.
• An optimization is essential; out of a total of 300 billion emails, imagine any of them not being optimized for mobile devices!
• Research also shows that an alarming 75% of emails sent out, if not optimized for mobile, are done away with — an easy swipe into the trash. That could mean 225 billion emails sent out would just be clicked into the trash every day.

Does that mean all the hard work and investment that goes into email marketing is a waste? Absolutely not!

Here are a few valuable tips:

1. When the subject link of the marketing email is sent out, personalizing it is an excellent way to get your target audience’s attention. The chances of the email and the attachments being opened increase by 17%.
2. Interactive emails have an impressive return. Email click rates are reported to increase by a shocking 300% when marketers include videos in them.
3. To improve the chances of opened emails, send them out in the morning; your target audience should receive them at around ten in the morning.
4. Security will always be a factor. You need to get consumers to trust you. 3 billion phishing emails are sent out every day, making email users hesitant about downloading attachments from sources they don’t trust. Take a look at this blog to find out how you can send more modern secure email attachments.
5. The demographic isn’t shrinking. The boomers and the older generations aren’t the only ones using email now. While many businesses focus on social media as their primary marketing strategy, the reality is that close to 80% of teenagers around the world use email (around 1.8 billion potential consumers) despite being avid social media users. It means that the demographic of email users, and thus, potential conversions, is also increasing.
6. Over 90% of all professionals check their email every few hours.
7. These facts are why about 87% of marketers still use email as a marketing tool.
8. According to Statista, about 50% of consumers want to hear from their favorite brands at least once a week.
9. On an average, people check their emails 15 times a day, which gives you at least 15 opportunities to make a greater impression.
10. Unsubscribe rates are extremely low, reportedly as less as 0.5%.

9 Email Marketing Metrics You Need to Know

Now that we have a good idea of the research, here are a few email metrics that you need to know as a sales or marketing professional.

1. Open Rate: How many of those emails do they open?
2. CTR: Click-through rate is a commonly used metric to determine how many receivers clicked on links you’ve sent out.
3. Conversion Rates: This is the number of people who have completed a specific action, such as subscribed to your newsletter or visited your website.
4. Bounce Rates: This is an important one - it shows you how many customers on your mailing list did not receive the email. It could either mean the account is inactive or that you’ve got the wrong email address.
5. Unsubscribes: How this affects you is that if the target customers don’t want to hear from you, it could mean that you have to change your methods. You cannot afford to lose potential customers.
6. List Growth Rates: This refers to your mailing list- add the number of new subscribers to your mailing list, deduct the number of unsubscribes, and you’ve got the number. Keep finding new ways of growing this list.
7. Being Sent to Spam: It’s never nice to be sent to spam. Either your target audience doesn’t think your content is worth their time, or they may never even know they got an email from you.
8. Sharing: This is a good one to keep a tab on and can be motivating. Understanding how many subscribers find your email useful enough to forward is a great way to see if your methods are working.
9. Returns: This shows you how much money you’ve made as a result of email marketing.

So, What Does This Mean?

What this means for sales and marketers is relatively straightforward: EMAILS WORK.

Now, sending out attachments is an excellent way to get both quality and quantity. Emails are still the most popular method of marketing. Marketers need to focus on these key metrics to understand if their campaign is working.

Invest in the right kind of email strategy. Emails aren’t going anywhere, and by the looks of it, email marketing is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

A Few Recommendations to Stay Ahead of Your Game

Email attachments work great as a marketing tool. However, as is the case with anything, there comes a time to move forward with technology. Your target audience still needs and wants attachments, but they may not like waiting for them to download. Moreover, attachments can be a little more complex to monitor.

That’s why links work better. They open up quicker and are a lot easier to share. Marketers get solid data on what is done with the links and precisely understand what the customer thinks or wants.

Analytics is key to a successful email campaign as it gives you an edge to create attachments that your audience enjoys and interacts with more. It also means an edge over your competition.

Invest in the right kind of email marketing strategy because email marketing is here to stay for years to come. Check out CloudFiles - a secure file sharing & tracking platform that integrates where your files live.