People assumed that email marketing was dead a long time ago because spam had taken over our inboxes and the rise of Gmail had essentially killed spam. And to a degree, they’re right.
Facebook posting took over where email sending fell off. SMS sending became more popular and platforms like Twitter and RSS feeds allowed you to get the info you wanted when you wanted it.But in 2018, it’s worth knowing a few interesting figures.
Only 2-9% of Facebook page posts get seen by the page’s followers.
RSS feeds tend to be set up once and rarely followed after a month – and are very much in the realm of the tech savvy.
SMS has around a 90% open-rate for messages received, but the intrusion factor is so strong that it also has around an 80% unsubscribe and block rate. So it’s not viable for ongoing marketing campaigns.
Email though, comes in at around 20% open rate. That doesn’t sound huge. But when you consider that banner ads have a 0.01% click rate, Facebook posts have a 2-9% impression rate (which is around a 0.5% open rate) then email doesn’t sound so bad.
Where email marketing get a bad rap is because of the rubbish we tend to send in those emails. And I’ve been guilty of it too. It’s hard not to get all salesy and promotional in there. After all, we’re trying to make money. So we need to offset that sales aspect with some decent content that adds some value. I’ll be putting up a follow-up blog post shortyly on this so you can see a few ideas on the kind of content to send via email to your subscribers. And lucky for you, it’s pretty easy.