Is Email dead?

It has been 46 years since the first ever email was sent. After all that time you might think its safe to say email is winding down. But you would be wrong. There are over 6.32 billion email accounts and around 3.7 billion active email users worldwide which account for the 269 billion emails being sent and received per day. While the end of email is nowhere in site, it is true that email is changing. People are now accessing their email on mobile more than ever. In fact it was found that 30% of consumers exclusively read email on mobile.

But what about email marketing? Email marketing (or the act of sending a commercial message to a group of people using email) is still very much alive. 80% of content marketers use email marketing and 55% of companies generate more than 10% of sales through email, making it a tool worth focusing on. MailChimp, the world’s largest marketing automation platform, has provided us with some best practices to make email marketing most effective.

First it is crucial to define your audience in order to effectively communicate with them. Once you define your audience it would be wise to refine them into segments in order to send more relevant campaigns to receive better results. Next, decide what to write. It is important to send emails with purpose that speak to your subscribers and reward them for caring about what you provide. These emails should be short, personable and useful. Nobody likes getting irrelevant mail pilling up in their inbox. It is also important to consider how frequently to deliver these campaigns. MailChimp suggests sending emails at least once a month to keep customers engaged but not so often where consumers find your emails annoying and unsubscribe. An easy way to go about this would be to creating a schedule outlining these steps.

There is also marketing automation, which is basically a software platform that automates most online marketing activities, such as abandoned cart notifications, follow up emails, product recommendations, and even tasks like retargeting. MailChimp has repositioned itself to be one of the industries leaders in this realm. Why? Because it is a huge, fairly new concept in an ever growing ecommerce world. It allows marketers to run repetitive tasks in the background, freeing up time to connect with customers and build your brand faster. Another industry leader in marketing automation worth keeping an eye on Marketo, in fact Charles Schwab Advisor Services was able to yield a 500% improvement in engagement after implementing Marketo automated marketing. Every marketer can benefit from such a tool, allowing you to be more involved in the buyers journey without investing hours on hours everyday.