3 Misconceptions About Email Marketing (Backed by Data)

There are many misconceptions about marketing, especially when it comes to email.

In our fast-paced world, email is a nearly-ancient technology. Interestingly enough, it’s still widely-used and gaining more users every year. To clear up any confusion, here are three misconceptions about email marketing that simply aren’t true.

1. ‘Email is dying.’

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Since the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, email usage has grown steadily. For more than 40 years, email users and businesses have relied on email to communicate and share documents. Even in recent years when technology has saturated much of the world, email usage continues to grow.

In 2013, there were 2.4 billion email users in the world. By 2017, Radicati projects that number will increase by 300 million to 2.7 billion total email users.

The number of emails that people send is also on the rise. In 2013, users sent 182 billion per day. That number is expected to climb to 207 billion, a 14 percent increase.

Not impressed? Here are few other facts to prove that email isn’t going anywhere.

• 91 percent of consumers check their email at least daily. Source
• Email is the #1 preferred method of communication in offices. Source
• 60 percent of executives read email newsletters as their primary news source.

2. ‘Millennials don’t use email.’

Millennials — roughly defined as people born between the 1980s and early 2000s who are avid users of technology — communicate on a wide variety of platforms. While apps like Snapchat and Instagram have driven the huge surge in mobile usage, email remains as important as ever for this generation.

A study from Pew Internet puts Millennials and tech use in perspective. Here are a few highlights from the study relating to tech and email usage.

56 percent of Millennials have sent an email in the last 24 hours.

Internet and email usage continue to rise.

83 percent of Millennials sleep next to their phone.

Check out LOTS more data in the report below.

While messaging apps and social media certainly influence the way Millennials communicate, email usage is still increasing for this tech-savvy generation.

3. ‘Social and mobile are killing email.’

It’s not often that email marketing is written up in the New York Times but it happened just last week. David Carr, the media columnist for the Times, wrote a compelling piece explaining why email is experiencing a renaissance, despite increased competition from social media sites and messaging apps. In fact, Carr argues, the value of useful email newsletters increases as the competition gets noisier.

Here are a few excerpts from the article.

Email newsletters, an old-school artifact of the web that was supposed to die along with dial-up connections, are not only still around, but very much on the march.

Newsletters are clicking because readers have grown tired of the endless stream of information on the Internet, and having something finite and recognizable show up in your inbox can impose order on all that chaos.

At a time when lots of news and information is whizzing by online, email newsletters — some free, some not — help us figure out what’s worth paying attention to.

An email newsletter generally shows up in your inbox because you asked for it and it includes links to content you have deemed relevant. In other words, it’s important content you want in list form, which seems like a suddenly modern approach.

It helps that email, long dismissed as a festering petri dish of marketing come-ons, has cleaned up its act. Gmail, in particular, has stamped out a lot of spam and segmented the inbox into personal, social and promotional streams that make email much less a mess than it used to be.

Email isn’t going anywhere. Check out our Ultimate Guide to Successful Email Marketing to learn more about harnessing the power of email.