New Channel for Reaching Customers: Email

Kids think it’s fussy and archaic, but for brands, creators and businesses of every kind, the emerging medium of choice to reach audiences is the only guaranteed-delivery option the internet has left: email.

Consumer email services have been around for almost three decades, but to hear email’s most ardent fans talk about it now, it’s an undiscovered country. In the #deletefacebook era, it’s become a way to fight back against the algorithms that try to dictate what people see. Unlike on Facebook, readers receive everything they signed up to receive, in neat chronological order, alongside missives from friends, family and their various communities.

For marketers great and small, the algorithms that power social media represent the ever-rising cost of doing business on the platforms owned by the duopoly of Google and Facebook. Email allows authors to intimately connect with readers, lets brands address their most loyal customers and budding startups develop armies of influencers.

Readers’ ready access to the “unsubscribe” button is largely a good thing for all involved, since it nudges email content creators to produce authentic, high-quality experiences rather than superficially engaging ones, and to connect in ways that are deeper than what ads-first media like Facebook generally allow.

Email still has the highest return on investment per marketing dollar spent, according to the Data & Marketing Association. And while Facebook, especially, has whipsawed marketers with ever-changing rules about how to reach customers, with email, a company owns its own lists.

What’s happening isn’t really an email resurgence—it just never stopped growing in scale and importance, says Sara Radicati, chief executive at a tech-industry analyst firm. Unlike tweets or Facebook posts, no one company controls or even sees all the world’s email, but estimates from Radicati’s firm show steady 4 percent growth a year in the number of emails sent, with a record 281 billion emails a day sent in 2018.

Email’s success is due to a handful of factors. The first is that, like the web, it’s one of the few open standards we have left. No one controls it.

Another factor is a dawning awareness that social media may not be particularly good for our mental health or our democracy, leading to a wave of users scaling back and even opting out entirely. The things that drive people to subscribe to and actually open emails are very different from the things that motivate them on social media.

A continued and growing love of email isn’t about to upend the cash machine that is search and social media.

“The whole world is just spread thin across devices and apps, so you also have to be on social, video, on paid search—everything all at once,” says Ben Chestnut, co-founder and CEO of MailChimp.

Source: Wall Street Journal