More than four billion people, or over half the world’s population, use email. That explain why email marketing is so effective. Email marketing has a return on investment or ROI of $42 for every one dollar spent, so if you spend one dollar, you’ll make an average of $42 back. There are many factors that make email marketing so effective. The lifespan of email, the insights you get from it, the ease of use, and the large number of email users.

Email marketing is when a company sends a branded email message out to a list of their email subscribers in order to inform, drive sales, and create a community for their brand. It’s a very effective tool for promoting services, products, goods, and stories to potential, new, and existing customers, and creating email marketing campaigns can be fun too.

To give you a clear idea of email marketing’s effectiveness, let’s talk about numbers for a second. You will hear the term return on investment or ROI often. ROI is a ratio of net income or money made, and investment or money spent, so ROI is used to evaluate the efficiency of an investment. So, at $42 earned for every one dollar spent, that would give you an estimated ROI of 4,200 percent. Email marketing has proven itself to be immensely effective.

Another reason email marketing has proven itself so effective is the lifespan of email. An email has been around for nearly half a century, and although it may look a little different than it did in 1978 when the first email was sent out, the general concept has stayed the same. The Data and Marketing Association found that 51 percent of people use the same email for over 10 years. That means as a marketer, once you get someone on your subscriber list, there’s a possibility that they could be your customer for 10 years.

Another aspect of email marketing that I find very effective is the use of insights collected during and after campaigns. Insights are pieces of information that are discovered through research or data analysis and that can be directly actioned upon to benefit your email strategy. When using email marketing automation platforms like Mailchimp, HubSpot, or other software, your insights will be just a few clicks away so that you can collect, analyze, and learn from them.

Finally, email marketing is so effective because of its ease of use. When it comes to email marketing, so many platforms, programs, and tools out there do a lot of the work for you. These tools, like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Salesforce, automate the process so that you don’t have to know everything when it comes to design, formatting, and hyperlinking.

So to review, email marketing is so effective because a large number of people use email, the lengthy lifespan of email as a medium, the built-in insights, and the ease of use.

More on email marketing

• Email marketing by Mailchimp
• What is email marketing? Definition, strategies, & tools to get started

Happy learning and good luck!