The well known Mark Twain quip — “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” — can now be used to describe what’s happening with email.
Yes, email has taken a beating in the last decade as social media and mobile took off like rockets. But in fact, email remains “a growing, go-to channel for marketers.”
That’s substantiated by a new eMarketer report entitled “Email Marketing Benchmarks 2016: Relevancy, Frequency, Deliverability and Mobility.”
The report notes, however, that for email to engender success, marketers must analyze how and why mobile use, increases in message volume and frequency, and data-driven relevancy impact performance.
Corroborating evidence for the effectiveness of email is a June, 2016 survey of U.S. marketers conducted by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and Demand Metric. The survey confirmed that email had a median ROI of 122 percent — more than four times higher than other marketing formats examined, including social media, direct mail, and paid search.
“Agency professionals and in-house marketers worldwide are in agreement about email’s effectiveness, according to March, 2016 polling from Econsultancy,” notes eMarketer. “Both groups named email marketing most frequently as a tactic able to provide a strong ROI, at 80 percent and 73 percent, respectively. The study also found that while respondents allocated an average of 16 percent of their overall marketing budget to email for 2016, the program contributed to 23 percent of total sales, a ratio that indicates email’s positive ROI.”
One further interesting observation: eMarketer estimates that there will be 240.1 million email users in the U.S. in 2016, accounting for nearly 89.8 percent of internet users and 74.1 percent of the population. By 2020, that number will grow to 258.9 million users.
Bottom line?
“While it is true that email’s ROI remains high, marketers must continue to determine the best way to effectively measure their programs’ performance, as the audience and best practices continue to evolve,” advises eMarketer.
