Deciding where to invest your marketing budget isn’t a decision you take lightly.
As a business your mission is to attract new customers and keep your existing clients coming back, but you can’t afford to invest time or resources into something that isn’t going to deliver the results you expect.

According to The Radicati Group, “Email remains the most pervasive form of communication in the business world, while other technologies such as social networking, instant messaging (IM), mobile IM, and others are also taking hold, email remains the most ubiquitous form of business communication.”

Say what you want about email being old and outdated, but the statistics don’t lie. Time and time again, email marketing has proven to be one of the most effective forms of marketing for both small and large businesses.

Email marketing is also a very personal way of reaching your target customers. Emails can be tailored to customer actions so that every communication is relevant to their interest. You can cover topics like changes in your company, victories, request feedback to your customer – this list is virtually endless. With 2.5 billion users worldwide, email marketing isn’t going anywhere.

And here’s why:
1. More effective than social media (for customer acquisition)
Social Media is a great channel for interacting with your audience and strengthening your personal relationships with them. And because of that, it is an important first step towards reaching your ultimate goal – the conversion.

But when it comes to converting people into members, customers or supporters, email marketing is the way to go.

A study by Custora from 2013 found that customer acquisition via email marketing has quadrupled in the four years preceding 2013. Email marketing then already accounted for nearly 7% of all customer acquisitions that occurred online.

2. Economic and Cost Effective
For many business owners who are working with limited budgets, email marketing is particularly appealing. That’s because email marketing yields an average ROI of 122%, according to a study from the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). It’s easy, effective, and inexpensive.

3 Personal and Customisable
In email marketing, what you’re really doing is segmenting your audience into lists, and sending each list a tailored email message that resonates with your reader and can provide them with something of value (segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue according to DMA, and marketers that use segmented campaigns, have noted a 760% increase in revenue, according to Campaign Monitor). By segmenting your email list, you can easily provide consumers with the personalized experience they crave and increase your conversions in the process.

4. It’s Easy to Track and Measure Success
To get the biggest ROI, tracking and measuring the performance of your marketing campaigns is essential. Some marketing channels can be difficult to measure, but this isn’t the case for email marketing campaigns, like SPOT (http://spotcms.co.za).

Thanks to automated technology, it’s easier than ever to track key metrics, the performance of your segmented lists, and even what devices your subscribers are using to read your content.
Furthermore, with software systems like SPOT, you are even able to track hot leads from each email campaign created and convert them into sales. With all this knowledge, you can adjust your campaigns to maximize your ROI.

5 Mobile devices allow people to check their email constantly
Because mobile devices have become so common, people are checking their emails all the time—in line at Starbucks, during their office commute, in the waiting room at the doctor’s rooms, at the grocery store, everywhere.

Some people think that with the growing popularity of social media platforms, email should be forgotten and may be pushed to the side.
A study in 2016 from mybroadband.co.za reports that in South Africa, almost 90% of people use smartphones to access their emails. This compared to 83% of the people who use their smartphones for social networking.

Not using email as part of your internet marketing strategy means you are missing out on a large channel that a majority of the world uses on a daily basis!