“Worldwide email use continues to grow at a healthy pace. In 2015, the number of worldwide email users will be nearly 2.6 billion. By the end of 2019, the number of worldwide email users will increase to over 2.9 billion. Over one-third of the worldwide population will be using email by year-end 2019.

Over the next four years, the average number of email accounts per user ratio will grow from an average of 1.7 accounts per user to an average of 1.9 accounts per user. Though there is increased use of IM, social networking, and other forms of communication, email continues to show steady growth, as all IM, social networks and other services require users to have an email address to access their services. In addition, all online transactions (i.e. shopping, banking, etc.) require a valid email address. “

Above is an excerpt from Email Statistics Report, 2015-2019 by The Radicati Group, Inc. The report was based on statistics and forecasts for Email and Mobile Email use from 2015 to 2019. It included data on both business and consumer adoption of email. When you read and digest the report in full, you will be convinced that, yes email was once dead, but email has bounced back better and stronger.

Email means many things to many people. Internal communication, B2B means of sharing information, newsletter, updates, cold-calling marketing and so on, are what readily come to mind when ‘email’ is mentioned.

There was an era that our darling friend, email, was declared dead by authoritative figures in advertising, publishing and marketing. They reduced email marketing to spamming. ‘Yaaaga”, many a follower adopted the gospel, subsequently gave up on email as a cheap, effective tool for creating awareness, nurturing relationships plus sustaining consistent conversations with clients for retention purpose.

Spamming, being bulk unsolicited message, is honestly synonymous with email -likewise bulk SMS. I receive an average of ten text messages from ‘God-knows-who’ on weekly basis promoting this offer or asking me to subscribe to that service I never showed interest in. That is spamming, it is equally annoying.

Pop-up display ads are not SPAM, right? But they jump on top of your nose while searching for vital piece of information. Some ads show up like hour-glass, you are somehow being told to respond to the ad or leave the website. These do not sound like SPAM, but they are unsolicited and annoying.

Advertising, online marketing inclusive, over-stepped boundaries, became interruption. Why was email singled out for crucifixion?

From the perspective of offering value to audience in exchange for their attention, from the perspective of asking customers for honest feedback, from the perspective of soliciting for clients’ input in product design or suggestions for personalizing services to best suit users, email is very powerful, conversational, heartfelt, personal and cost-effective.

The huge benefits of email marketing stand tall, tower high above prejudice of spamming attached to it in recent years.

Above all reasons email marketing, if done with best practices, should be prioritized by all businesses is the reality that marketing has become experience-based. Buyers patronize who they can trust with their hard-earned money. There are so many options, so many reasons to buy from you, someone else or not to buy at all. Thus, email should be seen as the go-to resource for starting, sustaining relationships which drive sales and customer satisfaction.

Your website may be search-friendly, it may attract traffic like a ‘cyber-magnet’, but users still have to look for you before they know what your website is up to. Your social media posts may go viral, you may garner thousands of shares and likes it is but a temporary victory.

Where is ‘Share a Coke’ today? It was all over the place last year. The campaign went viral, it was a huge success in terms of user engagement. But like every other campaign, they come and go. Also, there are glaring limitations to your banner ads as many browsers conveniently block pop-ups plus banner blindness that creeps in when audience get used to seeing your ad everywhere, every time.

Email marketing is the Goshen in Egypt when other digital marketing tools are plagued by these illness. Email is personal, it is on-the-go. Users carry it with them. People read emails anywhere, anytime.

When someone wakes up in the morning, before greeting their bedmate, they check their phones. One of those things they are most likely going to check is email. Why on God’s green earth don’t we embrace the goodies email marketing has brought to us?

Instead of unjustly murdering our loyal marketing errand-boy, let us look into what we are not doing right with it, correct those gray areas and move on to successful marketing with email.

Henceforth, let us adopt email marketing as a veritable means of intimating our targets with our brand message, adding value to our followers for their loyalty, nurturing visitors into leads, closing leads into customers, making customers promoters of our business by delighting them.

Let us stop the habit of sales-pitching everyone whose email we lay our hands on. Let our buyer personas tell us what stage of buyers’ journey the prospect is before we send message meant for Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) to first-time visitor to our website.

Let us create different email content for different segments of our audience based on their needs at a point in the purchase funnel. Email for creating awareness should be different from that of lead nurturing which should be different from email for delighting loyal customers.

Simply put, if all you do is get people’s email addresses and send them sales pitches without lead intelligence or any form of market research to know if they need what you offer, you are SPAMMING. And you are punishing people for sharing their email addresses.

According to Hubspot, 4.3 billion email accounts send 196 billion emails every day. 91% of consumers check their email daily. 77% of consumers prefer email for marketing communications. Email has a marketing ROI of 4,300%.

Tips from Hubspot for sending the right message to the right persons at the right time:
-Determine your audience: do a little market research to get familiar with whom you are talking
-Send the right email at the right time: message must tally with reader’s current needs.
-Nurture your lead into a customer: know you are fostering relationship not persuading to buy.
-Segment your contacts database: email content should not be one-size-fits-all
-Constantly update contact list: 25% of email database decays annually.
-Be mobile-conscious with email content: 47% of all email is opened on mobile.

Steps towards a perfect email:
-Define a clear goal for your email: choose what in particular each email should achieve.
-Focus on engagement: your message will be trashed if it asks for value instead of adding it.
-Personalize where appropriate: let the reader feel you are human not some robot
-Test and analyze: measure every email campaign, apply the result to subsequent campaigns.



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I turn your business worries to engaging stories for your target audience
via Social media, Email marketing and Blogging.
You could call it content-driven digital marketing.

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