According to a recent study from Return Path, 87% of email from marketers in the U.S. reaches inbox. Adam and Chad wanted to elaborate on this new email marketing study's findings, what email marketing is, the significance of email marketing as a marketing strategy, and how email marketing can be utilized as a way to boost your conversions. Watch this Daily Brown Bag to learn about email marketing, which industries are at the top when it comes to email marketing and reaching the inbox, and more insights about email marketing that you’ll want to know!
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TRANSCRIPTION:
Hello and welcome to The Daily Brown Bag. Today we're gonna be covering some breaking news, a study that covers that 87% of marketing email reaches U.S. inboxes. I'm Chad Hill and I'm joined by Adam Stetzer.
Hey, good afternoon, Chad. Welcome to The Brown Bag. We're talking about email marketing today which is, I think, Chad, safe to say traditionally for us not a very well attended topic. People seem to see it as pretty old, not exciting, not new enough. So I know when we do webinars and we float out blasts on this topic, we don't get as much traction as we do with SEO or social media. But this headline today is really startling - 87% of email from marketers in the U.S. reach the inbox. And it's something that's worthy of considering if you're really looking to increase your return on investment from digital marketing and get more customers.
We talk about this all the time. Email marketing must be a part of a well rounded, diversified marketing strategy. If you're not doing it or you're doing it poorly, you're absolutely just leaving money on the table. After you get a lead or after you have a prospect, to be able to nurture them along is one of the best ways to increase your conversions. So we talk about that all the time, Chad, thinking about email marketing as a way to boost conversion, kind of the same way we talk about re-marketing or re-targeting for PPC ads once you know there's interest.
But this study today that is the breaking news came from Return Path, and they've just released this 2014 benchmarking study on email deliverability. And again, the headline is 87% of email from marketers reaches the inbox. It was a pretty big study. They looked at a lot of countries. Australia and Germany had the most successful email marketing campaigns up at 89%, but in the U.S. and the U.K. at 87%, not far off from that, are doing better than the global average. And I guess the one question I have, Chad, does this work in all different industries or do you think this is only true for certain niches?
Well, I think some of the data they provided answers that question, Adam. And so it looks like that certainly some of the top industries were health and beauty with 96% of emails getting to the inbox. Insurance, apparel, food and beverage, automotive, these are all...and actually nonprofits and retail...all above 90%, though one of the lowest of all the different niches was actually software and the Internet, our favorite industry here, where only 43% of emails reached the inbox. So it actually varies from industry to industry, but I do think that overall this is still critically important.
We have some other stats here that we wanted to share. According to Experian, the average return on investment for email marketing is for every dollar spent, people are getting $44.25 back. So that's very, very good ROI. And actually 77% of consumers prefer to receive permission-based marketing via email. So this is the channel of choice for people to get these personalized emails in their inbox here.
And then finally, one of their staff from the Econsultancy's 2014 email marketing industry census revealed that companies attribute 23% of their sales to email marketing. That was only 18% in 2013. So Adam, you pointed out earlier we all kind of think of email as this crusty, old thing, but we keep seeing these stats showing that it's actually growing in importance. And we've discussed this in the past and attributed some of this to the fact that we're all carrying our phones around. And if we're busy in line, we're either clicking through some emails or reading a story, but actually the amount of email people are consuming is going up, all the while that all the pundits are talking about how email is dying.
So, again, companies still rank email as the best channel for ROI. In fact, 68% rate it as good or excellent. And then McKinsey & Company came out and talked about email has the upper hand for new customer acquisition that almost 40% ... the fact that email marketing is 40% more successful than social media. So I think we are, of course, heading into a couple of challenges. Google this year announced that they were starting to categorize and move basic commercial email into its own tab to separate it out from other correspondence. So I think that it's gonna get harder, but we still see here that the deliverability is fantastic.
Yes, and I don't think nobody would doubt, Chad, that it's ubiquitous in most of our lives. So if this is the channel that you are not leveraging, and I know a lot of people are very, very focused on search engine optimization. We hear that every day. Our reseller community is always talking about PPC; how can I get social to work for me? Well, email marketing is still alive and kicking. And you are probably not utilizing email marketing to its fullest capacity and integrating it well with your other digital marketing strategies to make sure you're maximizing your return on investment.
Well, that's our coverage of this breaking news on email marketing. We'd like your comments. Please leave a few on our blog, and as always we ask you to subscribe. We'll see you again real soon.
