Why is Email Marketing Important? (And DEFINITELY Not Dead)

We've already learned that email is an important component of the convert stage of the inbound methodology (as outlined in Dustin's (@DBrackett88) Inbound Marketing Services: Converting Leads to Customers blog post) and we will learn about how it can also help us in the delight stage as he wraps up his inbound marketing services blog series. But there's something else I would like to address in regards to email marketing...

We've all heard some version of it... Email marketing is dead. Email will be obsolete in (fill in the year). Email marketing doesn't work anymore. Well I'm here to tell you that those conspiracy theories just aren't true. And they won't be true. For a very long time. But how do we know that? And why is email marketing important?

Well at HIVE, not only do we strongly believe that email marketing is a crucial component of your overall inbound marketing strategy and is a great way to cultivate quality leads, we also know that your customers are already using it. And using it regularly.

Take the following into consideration:

89% of marketers say that email is their primary channel for lead generation.

Think about it, are there any of us who DON"T have an email account? In fact, the majority of us probably have more than one: at least one for work and at least one for personal emails. And we're checking it pretty constantly. Almost 34% of people say they check their email "throughout the day" and only 1.6% of people check less than once per day. And some of the basic strategies of inbound marketing overall are to help people to find your business and cultivate leads by leveraging the places that our customers already are spending their time. They're already looking at their email (daily) so of course we can (and should) capitalize off of that.

But what about all the buzz around other platforms replacing email?

I've heard it all. Social media (and it's messaging function) is replacing email. Text messaging is replacing email. Project management softwares (like Basecamp) and business messaging apps (like Slack) are replacing email. But when you actually take a look at those accustations and the platforms said to be replacing email, you'll quickly realize that email is still king. Sure we all use social media. Sure we all text. And, yes, a lot of our businesses (HIVE included) use those project management softwares and business messaging apps. But the fact of the matter is that all these platforms have been living in tandem with email for a while now and email usage has not been decreasing.

So is email dead?

No. Does email still serve an important marketing function? Absolutely. If we discount it now, we're sure to lose since, regardless of all the arguments that it's going to be obsolete and is already ineffective, we and our customers are proving otherwise. So until email actually is replaced by something else entirely (which I'm skeptical of ever happening), lets ignore the hype and follow the data that says it's still successful and that we should still include it as a component of our overall strategy.