One Little Fact Any Great Email Marketing Agency Knows

An email marketing agency’s expertise may seem overrated in the age of social, but listen up, there’s more to the story.

Are Millennials Moved More by Social or Email Marketing?

When you look at the most recent monthly active user numbers reported from the second quarter of 2016, Facebook comes in at 1.7 billion and Twitter at 313 million. You may immediately think that social media has got to be the best channel for connecting with audiences. Besides, there’s always a new social media platform popping up and isn’t social media super popular amongst millennials?

The stats are in and they tell a slightly different story. Among millennials surveyed by Fluent, 13% said that promotional emails affected their purchasing decisions all the time, while only 11% said that social ads affected them all the time.

Surprisingly, email marketing wins over social ads when it comes to affecting millennials purchasing behavior. Even among millennials who said they were affected only some of the time by these channels: 2% more of them said they were affected by email than by social ads (22% and 20% respectively).

So, where are all those emails being checked? On the go. According to Adobe, “Millennials are the age group most likely to check their email from bed (70%), from the bathroom (57%), or while driving (27%).”

The Email/Mobile Link

Another aspirational goal shared by many of today’s marketers is to engage with people on mobile devices. Well, eMailMonday may be saying email is the way to get there, when they share “Mobile email will account for 15 to 70% of email opens, depending on your target audience, product, and email type.” Let those numbers sink in for a second.

Circling back to our social discussion earlier, the Radicati Group found, “There are 2.586 billion email users worldwide, including both business and consumer users.” Wow, that 2.5 billion number may make Facebook’s 1.7 billion users look a little meager. Just to drive the point home, TechCrunch found “75% of Gmail’s 900M users access their accounts via mobile devices.”

Meanwhile, openers aren’t just looking at email, they’re taking action.

Harris Interactive states “81% of US online shoppers are more likely to make additional purchases, either online or in a store, as a result of emails based on previous shopping behaviors and preferences.”

And they’re loving it.

Marketing Sherpa shares, “61% say they like to receive promotional emails weekly and 28% want them even more frequently.” You can make the argument that email is friendlier than social because at some point the recipients said in some way, “Yes, I want to hear from you, please send me your content.”

Here on our digital media blog we’ve talked about how important it is to have great graphics and stellar video content to share with your audience. What we’ve talked less about is the best way to connect friends, brand supporters, and shoppers with your phenomenal content.

What does an email marketing agency know that you may not? If you set up the right creative marketing to improve your email list size, you could interact with more people through your email marketing alone than you do through social ads. And, it should be well worth your effort, here’s why:

Best ROI

Out of all the ways that you can share your brand’s content, email marketing has been shown to have the greatest ROI. The Direct Marketing Association says a well-implemented campaign can return up to 4,300%.

Re-engagement Ready

Email marketing lets you foster conversations over time. You can create a series of emails to be sent when contacts take specific actions, like when they sign up for a webinar or leave something in their shopping cart. It’s an easy and relatively inexpensive daily touchpoint.

Always Improving

When you send out an email campaign, you can collect data about how recipients respond. If you have your website linked to Google Analytics, you can tell things like how long those clickers stayed on the web page from the links in your email. You can use that data to make tweaks that improve your next campaign.

Social is still useful and it changes every day. But every great email marketing agency knows that email is your primary line for communication success. Reach out to New Park Creative today if you’d like some great content for your own campaigns.