What’s the first thing you do when you wake up every day?
I won’t be guessing, but various studies show that you might be one of the 60% of people who check their email.
And if you’re a marketer at the same time, I can see your eyes glow, thinking: “Whoo, smells like high conversions on an empty stomach.”
Jokes aside, email marketing is the most direct and cost-effective way to reach your audience and stay on top of their minds. Without much further ado, let’s dive right into what makes it so compelling.
Email marketing has the highest ROI
With an average ROI of $40 for every dollar spent—outperforming SEO ($22) and keyword ads ($17)—email marketing is a high-return powerhouse.
But why?
It’s because email marketing leverages minimal resources, personalized messaging, and direct access to consumers. Here’s a quick breakdown of the key reasons email marketing can provide such a high ROI:
- Low costs: Email marketing costs are largely limited to email software and list management tools, making it a budget-friendly option (further discussed below).
- Personalization: You can segment your audience and automate your emails to send relevant content to different target groups. Typically, this requires no additional investments since most email marketing platforms offer personalization even on the lowest-paid plans.
- Direct access: Emails directly reach a prospect’s inbox, ensuring better brand visibility than social media algorithms.
- Scalability: Email marketing efforts can be adjusted as your business grows without incurring significant costs or sacrificing efficiency.
- Measurable impact: The success of email campaigns can be measured via metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, or unsubscribe rates, making it quick and easy to tweak the content or adapt to other best practices for desired outcomes.
- Privacy compliance: Emails can only be sent to people who have opted in to receive them, reducing the risks associated with privacy and consent. (also discussed in detail below)
So far so good, but I don’t want to keep a high ROI as just a promise. Here’s a micro case study from a Canadian business to give you the bigger picture.
Despite its robust online presence, Eternity Modern, a Vancouver-based high-end home decor brand, lacked an email marketing strategy. Recognizing the potential of email marketing, the company developed a strategy from scratch, implementing:
- Nine email flows: Including welcome series, cart abandonment, post-purchase follow-ups, and re-engagement campaigns.
- Subscriber segmentation: Dividing the subscriber base into groups for precise targeting.
- List cleanup: Running a sunset campaign to remove disengaged customers, improve deliverability, and reduce spam rates.
Results:
- Added $80,000 in revenue within three months of launching email marketing.
- Increased revenue to $289,000 within 11 months.
Email marketing requires minimal operational costs
As indicated, email marketing requires minimal resources to set up and maintain. You only need a reliable email marketing services provider, basic infrastructure, and a copywriter or designer.
Sure, costs might grow as you scale the business, but they are still lower than other digital marketing channels.
For comparison, if you invest in blogs instead of emails, you pay the writer, editor, designer, and any tools you subscribe to for content creation and other supplemental efforts (think ChatGPT, Grammarly, etc.). You’ll also need to invest in a content analytics tool or an SEO suite that keeps track of your search rankings. Also, optimizing your articles would require further spending.
In contrast, email marketing is much cheaper and less labor-intensive. But I want to give you some numbers to put things in perspective.
Mailtrap’s lowest paid plan starts at $15 per month, allowing you to send up to 10K emails and have up to 2500 contacts. This is more than enough for a small business or a startup to create highly targeted campaigns. But even if you’re an enterprise with a bigger subscriber base, the cost remains manageable.
For instance, if you send up to 100K emails a month and have 25K contacts, the email delivery platform costs only $85.
That sounds cool, but I’d like to draw your attention to a simple, low-cost email campaign that yielded great results. It should help better understand the context of low operational cost.
Shiree Odiz, a small luxury jewelry brand, drove $69,400 in quarterly revenue from abandoned cart emails. Focusing on personalized subject lines and minimal design tweaks, the brand caught the attention of loyal customers without pressuring them to buy from the brand.
This campaign recorded a 41.4% open rate and a 1.4% click-through rate. Given the industry and the type of email, these metrics are more than satisfactory.
In addition, there was a follow-up email with a small discount sent to users who didn’t engage with the first abandoned cart email. In tandem, these seemingly simple re-engagement emails generated the revenue mentioned earlier.
Pro Tip: Note how Shiree Odiz’s first (abandoned cart) email is HTML including product images and a prominent CTA. Whereas the follow-up is plain text. This simple trick may improve conversions and engagement with the follow-up as recipients typically see plain text as more personal.
Email marketing helps acquire new customers at a low cost
Over the past eight years, customer acquisition costs have skyrocketed, the main drivers being increased competition, rising ad platform costs, and inefficient campaigns.
The trend sounds alarming, especially if you’re a startup or aim to scale your business. But you guessed it, email marketing is the light at the end of the tunnel. Let’s dive deeper into why:
The primary reason is that email marketing boasts a significantly lower cost per lead (CPL) than other channels:
- Email Marketing: ~$50 per lead
- Social Media Ads: ~$65 per lead
- PPC Campaigns: ~$175 per lead
This difference stems from the following:
- The potential to scale email campaigns at a lower cost compared to other channels.
- Emails are more effective at directly engaging a targeted audience. You send personalized messages directly into people’s inboxes.
- Email campaigns can be automated and reused, maximizing ROI without incurring higher costs.
And, as always, it pays to examine an industry example closely to get a ballpark idea of how cost-effective customer acquisition is with email marketing.
Important Note: I have to stress that all this assumes you have a tactful lead magnet. Don’t shy away from using other channels to disseminate the magnet. This setup can drive great results as long as the key conversion/point of engagement happens with email.
Take InfoShare Academy, an intensive programming courses provider. They tackled the challenge of converting tech enthusiasts into students by creating a strategic lead generation campaign and promoting it via social media and email marketing.
They offered a beginner-friendly eBook, “The 125 Coding Terms for Beginners,” showcasing InfoShare’s expertise and promoted it via targeted Facebook ads. The ads were just used to reach the targeted avatar, and the goal was to get the lead’s email address.
Interested parties who clicked the link got funneled from social media to a landing page and, from there, into a qualified email list.
A follow-up email sequence educated prospects on programming careers, positioning their courses as the ideal next step.
The campaign delivered results beyond the brand’s expectations, including:
- A 60% increase in email open rates
- 1,200 new subscribers within one month
- 10,000 new subscribers within 3 months
- A 35% increase in course enrollments
- A 25% increase in conversion rates
- A 15% increase in revenue generated from emails
Expert Tip: The education and courses industries have historically had some of the highest engagement and conversion rates due to the nature of the business. If you’re in SaaS, e-commerce, or other industry, the numbers could be lower but not insignificant.
Email marketing fosters direct and personalized communications
Email marketing allows businesses beyond superficial personalization (e.g., adding the recipient’s name). Instead, it enables brands to create meaningful, tailored experiences through segmentation and automation. Here’s how:
- Targeted messaging: As mentioned, email marketing lets you segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, and interests. Thereby, you can send highly personalized offers, increasing your chances of engagement.
- Enhanced customer journeys: Using automated workflows, you can design email sequences for various stages of customer journeys, such as welcome emails that tell your brand story, follow-ups that address customer concerns, and personalized recommendations that drive sales and revenue.
- AI-powered personalization: Incorporating AI elevates personalization further. AI can analyze customer behavior to craft tailored messages, automate feedback collection, gain customer insights by connecting it with tools like CRM, and schedule follow-ups. This can save you time and resources while delivering relevant and impactful content to your potential and existing customers.
As always, I’ll reference a real campaign that leveraged key user data to create personalized messages that cut through the inbox noise.
Note: The email case study is from 2017, but it’s still highly relevant as it shows the power of tactfully using customer data for marketing purposes.
The aviation space is fiercely competitive, which is why EasyJet, wanted to do something different to stand out. They transformed customer data into emotionally resonant stories and developed a hyper-personalized email campaign for their 20th anniversary.
Each email showcased the individual customer’s travel history with the airline, such as miles traveled, preferred seating, and routes taken. The campaign was promoted through dynamic visuals, clever copy, and targeted follow-ups, reinforcing EasyJet’s brand values.
The campaign achieved resounding success worldwide, generating:
- Over a 100% increase in email open rates compared to previous newsletters
- A 25% increase in click-through rates
- A 7.5% increase in bookings within 30 days
- A 30% increase in conversions in Switzerland
- An estimated reach of 685,000
- More than 1.1 million impressions on different social media channels
Email marketing provides access to unique data
Sharing personal information with companies, ad networks, and social media is often associated with the risk of data breaches—and customers are more aware of this than ever before.
In fact, 9 out of 10 consumers consider themselves to be “uninformed” about data privacy policies. So, how do you balance collecting customer data and maintaining user privacy?
Email marketing offers a privacy-first approach, enabling businesses to gather first-party data—information shared voluntarily and directly by customers—while respecting their privacy.
What does this mean?
- Direct and consent-based communication: Email subscribers willingly share their information, allowing for trust-based interactions free from third-party interference or privacy concerns.
- Rich, exclusive insights: Email campaigns give you access to real-time data like open rates, click-through rates (CTR), and engagement metrics. Unlike ad networks or social platforms, this data is unique to your business and cannot be accessed by competitors.
Analyzing email interactions reveals customer preferences and behaviors. This enables you to craft personalized campaigns that resonate, driving higher engagement and conversions.
For example, Pathpages, a seller of Notion templates, leverages behavior-based automation to turn subscribers into paying customers. Founder Modest Mitkus configured an automated workflow that adapts emails based on user actions, such as clicking links.
Here is how it works:
- Once a subscriber signs up, the marketing automation employed by Mitkus determines whether the individual is already a client.
- If not, it sends emails about the topics of his premium paid templates.
- When a link in an email is clicked, the workflow effectively recognizes that the recipient is interested in the subject and sends them a follow-up email with offers and information about relevant templates.
- The logic is maintained throughout the email series.
Pathpages got the following:
- An email open rate of 40%
- 80,000 newsletter subscribers, with just 15,000 signing up in a single month
Email marketing outcomes can be easily measured (and optimized!)
I often hear that, unlike other marketing channels, email marketing provides clear metrics. In all honesty, this is only partially true. It’s not like you can’t track ad conversions throughout different verticals. I mean, there are even services that allow you to guestimate lead or follower sentiment based on how they communicate and interact with your brand.
But (and it’s a big BUT, no pun intended), tracking metrics other than email can be tricky and requires experience, sometimes data parsing, and typically two or more tools.
Email is much more straightforward, usually containing all relevant data within a single dashboard.
So, here is a breakdown of the most critical metrics and how they help:
- Open rate: The percentage of recipients who open your email. Industry standards range between 17% and 28%, depending on the sector. A low open rate suggests you need more compelling subject lines or engaging preview text.
- Click-Through Rate: The percentage of recipients clicking links within the email. A strong CTR reflects effective copy, design, and CTAs, typically falling between 2% and 5% in most industries.
- Bounce rate: The percentage of emails that fail to reach recipients’ inboxes. A soft bounce may indicate temporary issues (e.g., full inbox), while a hard bounce suggests invalid or non-existent addresses, requiring list cleanup.
- Conversion rate: The percentage of users who complete a desired action (e.g., purchasing, downloading, registering). This metric directly ties email campaigns to business outcomes like revenue or lead generation.
- Engagement over time: This metric tracks when recipients are most active in engaging with your emails. Optimizing your send schedule based on this insight can boost open and engagement rates.
- Unsubscribe rates: The percentage of recipients opting out after an email. A high unsubscribe rate suggests content misalignment or audience targeting issues, offering an opportunity to refine your approach.
- Spam complaints: Monitoring the number of spam complaints helps ensure your campaigns comply with user expectations and privacy guidelines, safeguarding and even improving your email sender’s reputation.
You can use these insights to fine-tune your strategies. You can also experiment with subject lines, visuals, or CTAs to see what resonates best. However, you must remember to test variations with only one element at a time for clear results and send tests simultaneously to avoid timing bias.
Email marketing offers budget optimization options
Email marketing combines the strategic flexibility of ad campaigns with cost-saving advantages, making it a highly effective channel for budget optimization. I identified three distinct benefits that significantly help with budget optimization. Here’s what you need to know:
- Low-cost hypothesis testing: Unlike ads, which charge for every impression, click, or experiment, email platforms allow you to test hypotheses without additional costs. For instance:
- Experiment with CTAs to identify what improves conversions.
- Test subject lines to see which drives better open rates.
- Compare design variations to boost engagement.
- Audience targeting efficiency: Email marketing targets users who have opted in, ensuring a warmer audience than paid ads targeting broad, uninterested groups. This inherent interest leads to higher conversion rates and better ROI.
- Rapid feedback loops: Like ads, email campaigns provide near-instant feedback, and the adjustments are faster and more cost-effective than SEO strategies.
This eliminates the typical “burn money” phase in paid advertising campaigns, offering businesses a risk-free environment to find the winning formula. However, keep in mind that the email marketing platform counts every email as part of your quota. Even so, the overages are negligible, typically between $0.5 and $1 for 1000 additional emails.
Here I’ll reference Mad Mimi – Brooklyn-based email marketing startup that needed help to gain traction with a limited advertising budget. To optimize their budget and maximize ROI, they:
- Designed a highly targeted email sequence aimed at a curated list of businesses that would benefit from their solution.
- Offered a free trial as an incentive to drive sign-ups.
- Monitored results using real-time analytics tools to refine messaging and follow-up timing.
This particular email campaign generated insane results for the brand, including:
- 300 customers signing up within 7 days
- An estimated $10,000-$15,000 revenue with an investment of just $5,000
- An 8% increase in conversion rate from email clicks to customer sign-ups
Email marketing can be automated at scale
You can set up automated workflows throughout customer journeys to send personalized and timely emails triggered by schedules or user actions. This ensures consistent engagement at scale.
Basically, you can create, schedule, and send bulk emails, collect data to oversee and improve metrics, and run A/B testing to evaluate campaign performance.
Anyway, here’s how to approach automating your campaigns:
- Use dynamic segmentation: For instance, the cohorts may include:
- A subscribed contact has opted in to receive your email.
- An unsubscribed contact used to receive your message but has since opted out.
- A non-subscribed contact has interacted with your website.
Once you have that sorted, you can apply different conditions and logic like AND/OR to send hyper-personalized emails to super-specific user cohorts. Just to stress, don’t try to re-engage with the ‘opted-out’ cohort, but just have them in a special segment.
- Leverage trigger actions: Most email marketing tools allow you to set up trigger actions for en-masse campaigns.
For example, suppose a user has recently downloaded an eBook from your website and shared their email address in exchange. This action makes them a part of your lead list. In response, it triggers a sequence of nurture emails, such as educational content and promo campaigns, that may be useful for converting them into customers. Leveraging action triggers can help you automate messages like welcome sequences, cart abandonment emails, and post-purchase follow-ups.
- Personalize content at scale: You can use AI and machine learning to tailor subject lines, product recommendations, or even email timing for each recipient.
Tools like Clay are great for hyper-personalizing email campaigns by integrating data from various sources, ensuring higher engagement rates. Clay integrates multiple tools, such as LinkedIn, email, and CRM systems, streamlining complex email outreach workflows and automating repetitive tasks like follow-ups, scheduling, and list management. This allows you to focus on strategy while scaling campaigns efficiently.
- Integrate CRM data with email marketing tools: You can sync email marketing tools with the CRM platform of your choice to automate the collection and enrichment of customer data, ensuring your email lists are always up-to-date and accurate.
Skinny Fizz, a New Zealand beverage brand, began 2023 with a minimal email marketing setup – three basic automations and one campaign per month. But this wasn’t enough.
The limited strategy resulted in low repeat orders and stagnant list growth, making it imperative to improve engagement for customer retention. Therefore, they decided to optimize with automation.
Skinny Fizz developed comprehensive automation sequences aimed at every phase of the customer’s lifetime, strategically introduced pop-up forms inside the emails to grab the attention of new subscribers, and started weekly educational initiatives covering topics on wellness and sustainability to speak directly to their health-conscious audience.
Results: This strategy helped Skinny Fizz generate amazing results in just 30 days, including:
- A 28% growth in email list subscribers
- A 921% increase in email revenue
- A 101.49% increase in email click rates
- A 50.16% increase in placed order rates
- A 999% rise in email deliveries
- A 337.5% uplift in return on investment
This is a testament to the power of email automation, which unlocks scalability.
Email marketing offers opportunities for versatile content
Email marketing is more than words on a screen—it’s a versatile platform to share engaging and dynamic content tailored to your audience’s preferences. Whether it’s a video interview with an industry expert, a flash sale announcement, or a visually captivating product showcase, emails provide a blank canvas to bring your content to life.
And they even rival social media in content diversity. You can incorporate many elements beyond plain text, including:
- Images and GIFs: To add vibrancy to promotional messages or storytelling.
- Videos: To share interviews, tutorials, or event highlights directly in inboxes.
- Countdown Timers: To build urgency for limited-time offers.
- Interactive Elements: Include forms, polls, quizzes, surveys, and other forms of dynamic content tailored to user behaviors to encourage customer engagement.
- Animations: To enhance visuals and create immersive and memorable experiences.
Tools like Beehiiv offer libraries of templates designed for diverse needs, helping businesses experiment with elements that boost open and click-through rates.
Expert tip: Be careful with videos, images, and interactive elements. Unless you use them tactfully, they’ll affect email deliverability since many email clients block them.
Now, one of the best examples of a highly-deliverable email with diverse content comes from Dell. The study is old, but it’s evergreen and I’ll explain why right away.
Dell’s strategy makes sense today since it aligns with current email client limitations and gives you a clear idea of how to approach unique hooks in your emails.
The company geared up to launch its XPS 12 Convertible Ultrabook. The challenge lay in making the product’s benefits instantly clear to a highly visual audience without overwhelming them with text.
This led Dell to create a visually engaging email campaign that used GIFs to tell the product’s story. The campaign simplified messaging, focusing on visual storytelling to demonstrate the product’s key features. The brand built a strategic email marketing funnel and paired it with a clear call to action, ensuring the email’s design aligned with customer engagement preferences.
The campaign was a huge success, generating:
- A 6% increase in email open rates
- A 42% increase in email click rates
- A 103% increase in conversions
- A 109% increase in revenue generated through emails
Email marketing allows you to own your contact list
Social media platforms are notorious for unpredictable algorithms and sudden bans, often stranding creators and businesses. Imagine cultivating a following of 100,000 only to lose access overnight due to a platform’s decision.
This precarious dependence on third-party platforms is why savvy marketers prioritize email lists, which offer ownership, stability, and direct communication with their audience.
Moreover, email campaigns have an average open rate of 17-28% compared to Instagram’s 6.7% average engagement rate, followed by X (Twitter) at 4.6% and LinkedIn at 3.8%.
Looking at the data, it’s obvious why you need to own your contact list. But there are some points I’d like to reiterate and highlight.
- Full control: Unlike social media, where algorithms dictate reach, an email list is completely under your control. Each subscriber opts in voluntarily, ensuring your messages reach a trusted and engaged audience.
- Legal and privacy safeguards: Building your contact list ethically ensures compliance with privacy laws like GDPR and CAN-SPAM. This reduces legal risks associated with unsolicited communication.
- Algorithm-proof marketing: Social platforms like Facebook or LinkedIn frequently alter algorithms, diminishing organic reach. By owning your list, you bypass these changes and retain a consistent connection with your audience.
Luke Matthews, an AI writing coach, learned this the hard way after being banned on LinkedIn multiple times (8 and counting at the time of writing this post!).
Instead of relying solely on social media, he shifted focus to his email newsletter, creating a stable, long-term communication channel unaffected by platform policies. Luke’s newsletter now helps him market his courses and digital products to the 180,000 members of his LinkedIn community and amass hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
Email marketing presents huge remarketing potential
Remarketing through email campaigns is a powerful way to re-engage potential customers, increase brand awareness, and ultimately boost conversions. Whether targeting abandoned cart users, lapsed subscribers, or past buyers, personalized and timely email sequences can effectively nudge your audience toward action.
For instance, reminding cart abandoners of their selected items with an exclusive offer significantly improves conversion rates. And here’s how it’s done at the very top level.
Duolingo, everyone’s favorite language learning app, uses remarketing emails to re-engage its audience through creative strategies, such as:
- A/B testing to refine subject lines, visual elements, and calls to action (CTAs) for higher open and click rates.
- Urgency elements like countdown timers or limited-time offers and discounts for cart abandoners.
- Exclusive perks to loyal customers, such as early access or special discounts
- Gamifying user data to boost re-engagement motivation and in-app time.
These tactics have helped Duolingo amass over 113 million monthly active users, demonstrating the potential of well-executed remarketing campaigns.
Make the best of your marketing budget by investing in emails starting today
Email marketing is not even close to dead; in fact, emails can land you a million dollar investment. From improving the ROI of your marketing efforts at low cost to hyper-personalizing your way into your target audiences’ hearts, emails enable you to foster long-term relationships that grow businesses and build communities.
Ready to make the most of your marketing budget in 2025?
Kickstart your email campaigns with our practical guide on email marketing strategy today!