Every few years we hear that “email is finally dead”. It’s not.
Social media, SEO, and digital ads can be great ways to help promote your business, but lowly email still generally has (by far) the best return on investment. According to a recent study from some top companies:
The study showed that email-marketing ROI is currently calculated to be 4,400%, or about $44 return on every dollar you spend in your marketing campaign.
There are two big reasons why email is still huge, and why it’s not likely to go away any time soon:
- Everyone has it. Some people check it more often than others, but no one can escape it. By comparison, your friends, colleagues and customers are spread around various social networks, with things fragmenting a bit more every day. In some ways I still wish that “everyone” was on Facebook, but they’re not and they’re not all going to come back.
- It’s an open protocol. If you don’t like Facebook and you leave for Parler, you can no longer talk to people on Facebook. If you don’t like Gmail and leave for ProtonMail, you can still email 100% of the people you could before. Yeah, changing your address is a bit of a pain, but you’re not cut off from anyone. The core tenets of email make sure that’s possible.
Email has challenges, for sure, but I don’t see either of those items changing anytime soon. This is why I’m bullish on services like TogetherLetters, which use email as their glue. I worry that those kinds of services may not take off quickly enough due to user laziness (“it’s just easier to create a Facebook group”), but as social media continues to slowly splinter into separate apps, email will likely remain the one place that you can reach everyone.
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