Email marketing’s ROI is 42:1 compared to 2:1 for digital advertising!

Yup, you read that correctly! According to Litmus, for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses receive $42 in return. Separate research by Campaign Monitor found that for every $1 spent on email marketing, businesses get $44 in return. Compare that to the $2 that every $1 generates on Google Ads.

Photo courtesy of Campaign Manager (2018 statistics)

“Email is Dead!”

I hear this all the time from social media influencers, Facebook ads “gurus”, PPC people, and just about everyone else in the digital marketing space who loves to jump on the latest marketing channel (I’m looking at you FB Messenger) to sell their products.

It’s funny because last time I checked, email out-performed every other social and paid channel when it comes to ROI… by a lot! 

I’m not here to settle the score between email and everything else, I’m just saying that as marketers and business owners in the cannabis space, we need to spend less time worrying so much about advertising channels we can’t control and start focusing on the one marketing channel we can, email marketing. 

Here are a couple of reasons why you should be focusing on optimizing your email marketing efforts to make sure they’re running at 100%!

Email marketing has larger reach.

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users and Twitter boasting 255 million, it’s tempting to believe that social media is the most effective way to reach the masses. These are impressive numbers, but what isn’t so frequently shared are the statistics on email usage.

The total number of worldwide email accounts was 3.9 billion in 2013, and in 2021, 4.03 billion people around the world use email. 

While this might seem surprising at first, think about your own online behavior: When you sign up for a website (like an online store), you have to enter your email address to create the account. You even need an email address to create a Facebook or Twitter account. What’s more, Facebook and Twitter email to notify users of activity, like when someone is tagged in a photo.

Email is the currency of the web, and anybody who’s online has an active email address. And while Facebook and Twitter might seem pretty ubiquitous, the ongoing struggle over data breaches and privacy means plenty of people are exiting some social media channels.

So when it comes to connecting with your prospects and customers, there’s no channel with a wider reach than email.

Email marketing delivers your message.

If marketers have to choose between adding a subscriber to their email list, or gaining a new Facebook fan, they should go for the email subscriber every time.

There are two key reasons why:

First, 90% of email gets delivered to the intended recipient’s inbox, whereas only 2% of your Facebook fans see your posts in their News Feed. This is because Facebook limits the number of times your posts appear in the News Feed in an attempt to drive brands towards their paid advertising options.

This is a big deal when it comes to getting your messages in front of your desired audience.

On Facebook, if you post an update to your 10,000 fans only about 200 of them will even have a chance of seeing it in their News Feed. Alternatively, if you send an email campaign to 10,000 subscribers at least 9,000 of them will receive it in their inbox.

This means your message is 45 times more likely to be seen using email than Facebook.

Secondly, your email subscribers have explicitly told you they want to hear from you when they signed up for your email list.

There are strict laws and regulations around SPAM laws, so if you’re emailing a prospect or customer, it’s because they gave you their permission. Now think about the ads in your Facebook News Feed – did you ask those companies to market to you?

Probably not. More than likely, you performed a Google search or visited their website. That’s decidedly different than proactively signing up from an email newsletter.

Email is proven to ensure your audience gets your message.

Email marketing has a higher ROI.

Given email’s unmatched ability to drive conversions, it makes sense that email is also the most effective marketing channel to drive ROI for your company. In fact, email marketing yields an average 4,200% return on investment for businesses and for every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $42.

It’s clear from these statistics that email is a cost-effective channel for marketers, but why does it outperform other channels so significantly when it comes to ROI?

It comes down to delivering highly personalized and relevant messages. Unlike social networks where you send status updates to every follower regardless of their location, interests & purchase history, email allows you to be hyper-targeted with your communications.

The more data you have about your customers in an email marketing tool —including insights pulled in from integrated systems like your CRM, customer service solution, etc.—the more targeted you can be.

You can utilized segmentation and dynamic content to deliver the right message to the right person. For example, they know the gender of their subscribers and where they are located geographically, so they can ensure that females in the United States receive a promotion about bathing suits during the summer months and males in Australia receive an email about wetsuits during the winter months.

This use of segmentation and dynamic content helps to ensure the content they send is relevant to every individual recipient and that relevance drives people to click-through, make purchases – and increase the ROI of their email marketing campaigns.

Email marketing is an open platform.

Over the past few years, many brands have invested millions of dollars into buying large social followings in order to be able to communicate and engage with an audience.

But while businesses are investing in various social media platforms, Facebook has frequently updated its algorithm to reduce the amount of followers who will see a brand’s post, unless those posts are paid advertisements.

This practice has become so prevalent that 98% of brand followers will never see the posts in their News Feeds. Twitter seems to be moving in a similar direction with the announcement it will introduce an algorithm-controlled feed as well.

The issue with channels like Facebook and Twitter is they’re owned and controlled by third parties which means marketers are at the mercy of changes the platforms make to their platform, especially for cannabis brands.

Meanwhile, email isn’t owned or controlled by any one particular entity. It’s an open communication platform and there are a multitude of services that provide access to send and receive email.

The diverse array of companies involved in email marketing ensures that no one party can make changes that would have a widespread effect, and unlike Facebook or Twitter, if you invest the time and money into building and cultivating a great email list, your subscriber list will be an asset you own. Thus you’ll be able to leverage your list without the threat of someone limiting its effectiveness.