Have we not outgrown the lowly email yet? Once a pipeline to big bucks (or a way for mom to send us recipes we’ll never attempt), email increasingly seems like a “dinosaur” technology, eclipsed by the likes of SMS and social media. Is email even worth it?

In a word, yes. 4 billion people use email daily, and by 2023 that number is expected to grow to 4.3 billion — more than half the world’s population, checking email every day. That’s a lot of eyes to put a message in front of.

The most attractive fact about email as a marketing channel still applies — it’s dirt-cheap. Even if you buy an automation tool to manage a huge list, it’s pennies per CPM compared to the dollars per CPM you get with the likes of Facebook and Google ads.

Building an email list has long been the backbone of a business with a strong “back end” — which is every successful business. Basically, it costs a lot of money to acquire a customer … but it costs a tiny fraction of that cost to sell to that same customer again and again — for the cost of hitting “send” on an email. Once they have bought from you the first time, the hard part is over anyway.

You’re used to hearing numbers from me, so here you go — according to CampaignMonitor, email marketing has an average 4,400% ROI. You heard me right. For every $1 you spend on email marketing, $44 comes back. Who wouldn’t play that slot machine?

Yet nearly half the companies that approach us actually have customer email lists they’re not using. For them, my first instruction is to blast out an offer to that email list. It’s low handing fruit! A few people on the list inevitably buy the offer. You can thank me later for the free money.

Others don’t have an email list at all. So before we do anything fancy with Google or Facebook ads, we retool their landing page to automatically collect emails. That way, they can squeeze the maximum revenue out of every lead that our campaigns produce.

Want to email like it’s 2022 and not 1998? Here are five very simple tips to incorporate email marketing into an effective present-day digital marketing strategy:

1. Segment Your List

Personalization goes a long way in digital marketing. It makes the user feel like they aren’t just a number, but a valued customer. Put systems in place to tag each new email lead with crucial information — ideas include… pages visited, actions taken, products purchased, survey forms answered, etc. Create different email sequences for each tag to personalize the content to each user’s specific activities.

2. Be Timely

It’s nice to create automated sequences that fire off to your leads without you thinking, but don’t rely on them completely. Send out timely email blasts about product launches, events, and big announcements. And it doesn’t hurt to get a “Happy Halloween” message on Halloween.

3. Go Mobile

More than half of all web traffic now takes place on mobile devices; that includes emails. Make sure your emails look good on mobile devices; otherwise, your message will be dismissed by half the recipients.

4. Use Dynamic Content

Want to take personalization to the next level? Introduce dynamic content, which adjusts based on user behavior for an even more customized experience.

5. Share User-Generated Content

Why wrack your brains to create content when your customers can do it for you? Thanks to social media and Web 2.0, the internet is replete with “user-generated content”  — social posts, online reviews, etc. Grab a few testimonials and blast them out to your email list for a quick shot of social proof.

Of course, to leverage email marketing you have to get the email leads in the first place. Ogline Digital specializes in driving leads and sales to businesses that may have never even considered a digital transformation. Reach out to us today to see how we can grow your business online.