Email Marketing: Why You Should Have a Mailing List
- adojo GmbH
The death of email marketing has been repeatedly predicted in recent years. Whenever a new social network or messenger emerges, online marketing media and blogs proclaim the beginning of the end for email marketing. However, email has maintained its position in the hierarchy of online marketing since the dawn of the web.
Billions of Emails Daily – Increasing Trend
When Ray Tomlinson sent the first email to his colleagues in late 1971, he could not have imagined that by 2016, over 625 billion emails would be sent daily. Statista even predicted an increase to over 732 billion in 2017. Since 2000, this number has risen by 2166.87%! And this doesn’t even include spam …
Source: de.statista.com
Who Needs Emails When There Are Social Networks and Messengers?
This question has been asked repeatedly over the years. The irony is: to sign up for social networks and all other online services, you need an email address. Without an email address, there’s no Facebook, Twitter, Xing, Amazon account, Apple ID, and so on … our digital lives would be impossible without email. „Today, social networks, along with major shopping platforms, are among the largest email senders in Germany.“, said Jan Oetjen, CEO of WEB.DE and GMX in February 2017. (Source: „2016 Rekordjahr für E-Mail“ unter newsroom.web.de)Why Should You Build an Email List?
83% of Germans used the internet to send and receive emails in 2016:
Source: de.statista.com
Additionally, Bitkom found in 2014 that 93% of German internet users have one or more private email addresses, most having up to three.
Quelle: de.statista.com
In contrast, “only” 67% of German users are members of social networks (Source: www.bitkom.org). Apart from reaching a much larger audience, email marketing offers several other advantages:- Speed: The first email took 24 hours to deliver, but today emails are typically delivered in seconds. Business email recipients usually have their email client open all day. In my social circle, many people sync their private email accounts with their smartphones and get notified for each new email.
- Design Flexibility: Aside from some basic HTML programming, you have a lot of freedom in designing a newsletter. Even engaging animations are possible with GIFs.
- No Algorithm Reduces Reach: Both Facebook’s news feed and Google’s search results use algorithms to control what users see. Emails, as long as they don’t violate spam guidelines, arrive unfiltered in the inbox. The recipient can read them at their convenience without needing to check a service multiple times a day to stay updated.
- Platform Independence: The customer data in your email list is yours and always available in your email tool, CRM, etc. You don’t have to share it with a social network and are not at the mercy of policy changes from tech giants in Silicon Valley.
- Customer Loyalty: Clicking on a Google Ads advertisement or liking a post is often instinctive. However, users are much more cautious with their email addresses. For you, this means that anyone who subscribes to your newsletter has a genuine interest in your company and products.
- Automation: “We miss you! 20% off for a reunion,” “Happy Birthday, Daniel Haag! Here’s your gift,” “Your purchase was interrupted” – do these subject lines sound familiar? Email marketing can send personalized emails for every moment in the customer lifecycle. Reactivate inactive recipients, engage customers with personal discounts, or recover abandoned shopping carts. A professional email marketing tool can automate all of this for you.
- Data Privacy: Since Edward Snowden’s revelations, European recipients, authorities, and businesses have placed high importance on data being hosted within the EU, or preferably, within their own country. In Germany, many providers store your email lists according to strict German data protection laws, unlike Google and Facebook.