featured image for article on email marketing 2022

What’s your favorite online marketing strategy for 2022? Social media marketing is fun, that’s for sure. SEO takes time, but it can help you get free search engine traffic when done right. PPC may give you faster results but can be a serious money drain.

Email marketing, on the other hand, does take a lot of work – from building your list one email at a time to sending out regular content to your subscribers. But, as you will learn in this article, the pros certainly outweigh the cons.

So, the question now is, will email marketing still work in 2022? And is it still a good idea to spend resources building an email list from scratch? Or is email marketing dead? Let’s find out!

Will email marketing remain relevant in 2022 and beyond?

Online marketing has opened a lot of new strategies for advertisers to reach their audience on the web. Online interaction and content consumption preferences continue to change, making it super crucial for businesses to keep up with evolving marketing techniques.

But just because Tiktok and influencer marketing are all the rage these days doesn’t mean that relatively old-school email marketing isn’t good anymore. Email marketing may be “boring” compared to more modern marketing channels, but it’s far from being ineffective.

do emails still work for marketing

Here’s why email marketing will continue to remain relevant in 2022 and beyond:

* There were more than 4 billion email users in the world in 2021 (half of the global population). This number is expected to continue climbing up in the next few years. (source)

* In terms of emails sent and received each day, an estimated 320 billion emails were sent and received daily in 2021. Again, these numbers are expected to continue trending upwards. (source)

* Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. Every dollar spent in email marketing yields approximately $42 in sales! (source)

* There were 6.378 billion smartphone users in 2021 (source). Every modern smartphone comes pre-installed with an email app, e.g. Mail for iOS and Gmail for Android.

* Most online services require an email address for account creation, e.g. social media, ecommerce stores, media streaming services, etc. Email will continue to have a use case for years to come!

Tips to make email marketing work for you in 2022 and beyond

Whether you’re new to the email marketing game or not, it’s high time to spice up your 2022 email campaigns. Get started with our 7-step email marketing checklist and follow these tips:

Use user-generated content

It’s not easy trying to come up with email content your subscribers will find valuable. Fortunately, you really don’t need to look very far for inspiration.

To begin with, you can use product reviews and customer feedback. You can also use photos and videos submitted by your customers to your social media pages.   

If you have no such content yet, you can ask your subscribers to submit their content via email. Or, they can use a branded hashtag on social media so you can easily find their submissions in one place.

Either way, don’t forget to credit the authors and give them a shoutout in your next email!

Make your emails interactive

Strike up a conversation with your audience. Asking them to submit user-generated content is a good start.

But did you know you can also ask them to participate in polls and surveys? For example, if you’re thinking of launching a new product, which would they prefer – Product A or Product B?

Additionally, you can also add video to your email. This not only helps break up the text but creates engagement as well. But adding a video directly isn’t always feasible (huge file sizes), so the next best thing to do would be to add a gif of the video or a still image with a play button on it. Then when people click on the still image, they’d be redirected to the full video so they can watch the whole thing on YouTube, Vimeo, or wherever the video is uploaded.

Crowdsource ideas from your subscribers

Crowdsourcing can help you get ideas for a lot of things – your next email content, user-generated photos and videos that you can use in your marketing campaigns, new product ideas, and so much more!

How?

By asking your subscribers to help out. To help them decide in your favor, offer incentives such as a free shoutout, a cash discount on their next purchase, a free product, etc.

You can also gamify your crowdsourcing activity to encourage even more subscribers to participate. In addition to the rewards mentioned above, you may also want to give out prizes such as the latest tech gadgets, a free holiday to a tropical resort, or any other high value prizes your audience will absolutely want to have!

Segment your email list

If you haven’t segmented your email list yet, that is, you’re sending the same email to everyone on your list, then you’re leaving a lot of money on the table.

Email segmentation can help you send the right marketing offers to the right group of people. This is especially important if you sell a wide variety of products in your ecommerce store.

For example, if you sell pet products, then the dog crowd won’t get content related to cats and hamsters, and vice versa. Instead, each pet group or segment will only receive emails related to their type of pet.

By sending targeted and highly relevant content to your subscribers, you’ll get higher engagement and clickthrough rates. Best of all, segmented email campaigns can lead to revenue increases by up to 760% – that’s a very significant amount of money added to your bottomline!

Here’s an infographic to give you an idea on how to segment your list for your email marketing campaigns in 2022 and beyond:

12 ways to segment your email list

Note: if you’re using Blue Odin to manage your ecommerce store(s) and send out marketing emails,  check out this guide on how to create customer segments in Blue Odin.

Conclusion

Email marketing isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s one of the most inexpensive marketing strategies that can give you tangible results, especially in terms of sales and profits.

If you’re not sure how you can get started with email marketing in 2022 for your ecommerce business, check out our free email marketing course. Learn how to start building your email list, improve your conversion rate, write great emails, and sell more products to your subscribers!

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