Is email marketing profitable in 2023?
This is one of the most asked questions as soon as I recommend using it to earn money online.
I’ve noticed there’s a huge misconception about the state of email marketing and if it is a viable strategy for marketing offers.
I’m planning to clear this all up.
In this post, I’ll share why email marketing is still one of the most effective ways to market your content, offers, and products through examples and statistics.
I’ll also get into how you can calculate and increase the ROI of your email marketing campaigns.
Let’s get into it!
What makes email marketing valuable?
Email marketing gives you a second chance to communicate with potential buyers and clients.
Without email marketing when someone leaves your online store or website you have no guarantee that they’ll ever come back.
People might be interested in what you’re offering but buy it from someone else purely because of something small like timing or a lack of context.
If potential buyers and clients subscribe to your email list you can contact them whenever you want which can be the difference between losing clients or tripling sales.
From experience, I can say that this website wouldn’t exist without email marketing.
I remember when I first started getting a substantial number of website visitors.
I was extremely excited but after a while, I started to notice that people kept looking at my content but they never bought something.
It caused me to lose motivation over time and as a result of my slacking my traffic numbers started to dip.
When my frustration peaked, I started looking into email marketing and ended up on a website promoting a product called autoresponder madness.
This program talked about exponentially increasing your sales by creating email sequences to give more context about why your offers are valuable.
It also talked about offering your product at a later point in the email sequence after building rapport.
After implementing their teachings, my sales skyrocketed from earning $23 a month to $100 a day in a matter of months.
That is the power of email marketing.
Do people still read their emails?
The emergence of YouTube and Social Media has cast a shadow over many people’s eyes when it comes to marketing.
Yes, most people spend a lot of their time on social media but also check their email daily.
Number of e-mail users worldwide from 2017 to 2025(in millions)
Source: Statistica.com
As you can see, the number of users is growing daily and is estimated to grow even more in the following years.
They might not spend the same amount of time in their inbox as they do on social media but not a lot of time is needed to direct someone to the offers on your website.
Email marketing doesn’t require much time and energy but can bring in so many more readers and sales that it’d be a shame to neglect it.
The Costs of email marketing
Most of the costs in email marketing are in the email marketing service you pick and the method you use for acquiring email addresses.
Dependent on the email marketing service and your operation costs can range from $19 a month for solopreneurs to thousands of dollars a month for larger businesses.
The lead generation if not done through organic marketing can also go from $100 dollars a month to tens of thousands of dollars a month.
Some people use content marketing and SEO to get organic traffic while others invest in advertising on platforms such as Facebook, Google Ads, Instagram, etc.
Aside from your email marketing service, your time and energy can also be seen as a cost. You need to decide for yourself how much your time is worth.
Put these 3 things together and you’ll have your costs for marketing mapped out.
Your gains earned through email marketing
What is considered your gain in email marketing heavily depends on your goals.
People get into email marketing for different reasons such as:
- Content marketing
- Lead generation
- Lead nurturing
- Customer retention
- Increasing the average lifetime value
- etc.
This can make it hard to determine what is actually a win in email marketing and what isn’t. In some instances, a gain could simply be website clicks, engagement, or simply product sales.
This is why generally marketers put a price on every lead that they acquire dependent on the end goal.
In Google Analytics and similar programs, you can assign a value to every lead and see if you can get to that point every time a lead conversion takes place.
After that, the results can be read in reports produced by applications such as Google Analytics.
The ROI of email marketing
Now that we know how to find out the costs and gains we can calculate the profitability of email campaigns by finding out the ROI.
What is a ROI?
ROI stands for return on investment which is a term used to measure if something is worth the time, energy, or money you put into using or acquiring it.
In email marketing, we often talk about it in the terms of money you invest in email marketing and how much you’re getting out of it.
Email marketing might not be as popular as social media at the moment but it has the highest ROI of all forms of marketing.
On average email marketers earn $36 for every $1 they spent.
This is absolutely insane when you think about how much money can earn with email marketing.
ROI is the most effective strategy for calculating the profitability for not only email marketing in general but also for you personally.
How to calculate the ROI of your email campaigns
Calculating the ROI of your email marketing campaigns is a lot less complicated than it sounds. The hard part is mapping out all the costs you make to sustain the campaign.
This doesn’t only mean money in the general sense but also how much money your time and that of your team if you have one is worth.
After that, you put on paper the revenue you earned by doing your email campaigns.
ROI is expressed in a percentage which means you’re going to divide the difference between revenue and costs by costs to get the ROI.
So basically the formula for calculating your ROI in percentages would be:
(Revenue – Costs)/ Costs = ROI
How to increase the ROI of your email marketing
The key to increasing the ROI of your email marketing lies in personalization
The more you know about your subscribers, the more personal you can get with them while communicating through email. Not every subscriber in your email list has the same goals or expectations of your email campaigns.
The sooner you take that into account while creating campaigns, the better.
Some subscribers might be interested solely in your content while others subscribed for special discounts or your premium services.
This is why it’s best to gather as much information as you can from your subscribers and start segmenting your list so that you can provide the subscribers with exactly what they want.
Final Words
I gave you a way to calculate your return on investment, showed you some email marketing statistics, and even shared with you the key to increasing your ROI.
These are the same things I looked up years ago to come to the conclusion that email marketing is very profitable and even that the profitability keeps rising every year.
That being said, it’s only profitable if you do it in the proper way. This why I recommend taking full advantage of the knowledgebase and blog posts the website of your email marketing service has.
Take courses and learn as much as possible about creating email campaigns, optimizing them, and being aware of email marketing do's and dont's.
If you do that your business should have a bright future.
That’s all I have to say for today.
If you have any experience with email marketing and making it profitable I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
See you in my next post!
