Obsolescence is a big, scary word in the world of technology that year after year is pinned on every new device, service or system that suddenly loses its appeal, no matter if it was the King of the Hill up to just a couple of years earlier. Do you remember when floppy disks became obsolete in favor of the much more popular CD-ROMs thanks to their higher capacity? It happened just 20 years ago, yet even CDs now look like relics of an ancient past. And what about forums and bulletin boards or dial-up modems? How is then possible that email marketing can be traced back to 1978, yet keeps being so popular even today?
According to a recent survey made by the analysts at GetResponse, one of the oldest and most widely known email marketing firms, ROI-wise, email are still the most effective digital marketing channel. Most of those who used email automation as an online marketing strategy improved their results in terms of leads generated and increased conversion rates. The percentage of marketers who planned to increase their email marketing budget in the upcoming year topped 70 percent of affiliate network marketers and 64 percent of marketers in the education and online business sectors.
As the globalization process keeps widening the range that companies are able to reach, implementing more advanced marketing automation solution has become a necessity rather than just an option. Even the medium-sized business (SMB), who traditionally lacked the resources to access the more advanced (and expensive) automation software, recently expanded their horizons to this sector. As Daniel Brzezinski, CMO and VP of Marketing and Product Development at GetResponse, explained in a recent interview with VentureBeat that one of the biggest challenges SMBs had to face is “sheer ease-of-use. Unlike enterprise businesses, most SMBs don’t have extensive IT expertise in-house.” Emails, however, proved to be one of the most accessible automation channels due to their flexibility in terms of content, size and formatting, even for the “less digitalized” managers. And on top of that, they still represent an incredibly efficient marketing strategy since they could be easily tailored to entice almost every customer by reaching him or her quickly and on a personal level.
When websites had to adapt themselves to the new smartphone technologies, emails did that too and quickly evolved into mobile emails. And shortly thereafter, the marketing content found inside them improved their responsiveness as well. Recently, even the biggest barrier that prevented reaching Gmail and Android without working within the suffocating restrictions of Hybrid/Spongey/Fluid email coding fell down. On October 2016, Gmail added support for the “style” tag as well as many CSS tools that now allow emails to be coded just like web pages.
Although they’re one of the oldest (if not the oldest) forms of digital communication, emails keep being modern and up-to-date as any other much newer service. They never stop evolving through the ages, and effortlessly transitioned in their new mobile incarnation. As long as people do not stop using them, it’s no surprise that email marketing keeps thriving as one of the simplest, yet incredibly efficient ways to personally reach out every single customer rather than just a nameless segment of the population.
