Email is one of the oldest forms of online marketing. Yet, it remains one of the most effective to this day. According to Neil Patel and WordStream, the average ROI of email marketing is at least 4,000%. This is twice the ROI of SEO and around 2.5 times the ROI of PPC.
Any marketer that looks at the statistics should be in awe. It seems like a no brainer that they should be investing their time and resources building email marketing funnels. Unfortunately, many people mistake the high ROI of email marketing with a misguided belief that it is easy to generate money with it.
The ROI reflects a minority of marketers that understand the nuts and bolts of email marketing and have used it to generate impressive returns. There are many other marketers that struggle to breakeven, because they don’t understand the logistics of email promotional funnels.
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Before you focus on email marketing, it is important to do your due diligence. You need to understand the mistakes that marketers make that prevent them from realizing a positive ROI.
Here are some of the reasons that many email marketers fail:
Experts like Neil Patel often throw around the statistic on the profitability of email to make a point. Unfortunately, this is often counterproductive. They make it sound like you should be investing in email marketing over PPC, SEO, social, native or other types of marketing strategies.
The problem with this is that email marketing is not a substitute for other types of traffic. They all need to fit seamlessly into the same funnel. You need to invest in other types of traffic to build your email list first.
By putting so much emphasis on the benefits of email over PPC, some experts have unintentionally duped people into thinking that they don’t need to drive targeted traffic to their email subscription pages.
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One of the mistakes that I see a lot of people making is investing in low-quality PPV traffic sources or banner advertisements to build their email list. These types of traffic often have low initial subscriber opt-in rates and a low ROI at later stages of the email funnel. Instead, you should be focusing on using higher quality traffic sources. Facebook, AdWords and SEO tend to be the best. Certain native advertising traffic sources are also great.
Segmenting your email list is very important. You should be using separate landing pages for different offers. Many marketers get this part right. However, too many people then merge the subscribers into a single, consolidated list.
You need to make sure that each subscriber is placed into a funnel that ensures they will receive future offers that resonate with them. Almost all modern marketing automation platforms enable you to do this. Make sure that you take advantage of them. This should increase your click-through rate by 5% and other metrics can be impacted even more.
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The biggest reason that the returns on email marketing are so high is that you have an excellent opportunity to sell offers after building strong relationships. However, you can’t rush the relationship building process. If you start trying to sell to your subscribers too early, then you will face a lot of problems.
Ryan Deiss Discuss this in many of his guides on email marketing. He says that he usually provides two or three promotional emails before trying to pitch any of his subscribers. This system is proving to work pretty well. It certainly has a much higher ROI then trying to market at the very beginning.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to build a brand reputation and generate sales. However, it is only effective if you have a solid strategy in place. Make sure that you understand your goals and have a seamless funnel to get the right ROI.
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