Why No One Talks About Email Marketing Anymore

It seemed like social media feeds were jam packed with messages singing the praises of email marketing not long ago. Online entrepreneurs had discovered digital gold and were teaching everyone else how to dig and strike.

Suddenly all talk has disappeared and seems as if live streaming and other new tech has replaced what was once the hype of online marketing.

Where Have All the Email Marketers Gone

Marketers are still using email and still making money through it. Email hasn’t gone anywhere. The only thing that has changed is marketers have moved on to other sexier topics. Email isn’t a sexy topic. Email does’t get anyone excited. If anything, you’ve tried email marketing and felt like you just didn’t have what it took to be successful with it. Lots of work, a huge learning curve and very little payoff.

Out of all internet communication tools that exist today, email is the oldest and that is precisely why it’s not going anywhere, despite it seeming as if all the email marketing ambassadors abandoned their posts.

Stats Aren’t Lying to You but You’re Lying to Yourself if You Ignore Them

HubSpot is a fantastic place to turn to when you’re looking for industry trends and statistics. Here are three stats curated by HubSpot that you cannot ignore when it comes to email.

• As of 2013, there are 3.6 billion email accounts.
• 91% of consumers check their email daily.
• 66% of consumers have made a purchase online as a result of email marketing.

You can read the full list of stats here.

If you are trying to sell something online email is a dependable, accepted and proven to method to creating positive results. The problem is that it is not easy to write emails that convert. It takes time, it takes persistence, it takes strategy and it takes an ability to stand out from the crowd.

In the same article, HubSpot also references the following stats.

• 54% of emails sent by businesses are marketing messages.
• 838 billion marketing messages were sent in 2013.

You have some stiff competition.

Back to the comment about email not being sexy. You can test this theory yourself. Write an equal number of articles on your website for live streaming, Facebook Ads and email marketing and see which content gets the highest level of hits and the greatest engagement.

As much as you see this ring true, there is one other reason email has fallen out of the daily marketer’s narrative.

It’s incredibly hard to teach someone how to have an impact through email without addressing an entire business strategy.

What Three Things Every Marketer Must Know to Be Effective Using Email

Standing out using email comes down to knowing three things. Admittedly, identifying these three things takes time and a lot of hard work. When you do gain clarity on the three things I’m about to share, you will guarantee your ability to stand out and connect deeply with your subscribers.

You must know the following three things:

• Your why (what it is you do that makes the world a better place)
• Your audience (who it is you are talking to, SPECIFICALLY)
• Your offering (what it is you’re trying to promote or sell)

When you have clarity around each of these three things in your business, you give yourself the ability to breakthrough the noise of every other message in your subscriber’s inbox. Subscribers will no longer relegate your emails to “marketing emails” – or the delete folder. You find a special place in your reader’s inbox – they gravitate towards your message because you connect on a deeper level than that big electronics store email advertisement.

Effective email marketing comes down to knowing 3 things: your why, your audience and your offering.Click To Tweet

Why Knowing “Your Why” Is Essential

Many entrepreneurs start out in business wanting to work with anyone and everyone. Perhaps you took on a variety of clients in a variety of industries for a variety of services. For a doctor you’re producing video, for a construction company you’re creating printed materials and for a non-profit you’re managing a website. The variety of projects reflects a lack of specificity in the reason why you exist. The variety also prevents you from being able to focus in on a particular purpose for your organization. Instead of having a purpose for making money, your purpose becomes making money.

Identifying your why means that you will have clarity on what you do that makes the world a better place. When you step outside of your why, you do not make the world a better place. When you stay within your why, you have a deep and lasting impact on those who you work with – you make their world a better place.

Your why is essential to email because when you lack purpose, you lack substance and ultimately you lack story.

Why Knowing “Your Audience” Is Essential

Knowing your audience is marketing 101. As you’ve most likely experienced, actually producing a viable “avatar” is incredibly difficult.

It is essential that you do not give up on identifying your audience because it impacts every word you write in your email. To illustrate, picture yourself sitting at a coffee shop across from someone who you would love to work with. Everything you love to do, they need desperately. How does knowing they want to hire you to perform the services you love doing impact the words you use?

When you know who your audience is, you can say things like, “You have tried email marketing in the past and it didn’t work. Though the potential for impact was there, you were finding that you didn’t have enough time to create an ecosystem of content to support it.”

Your audience is essential because if you lack focus on what words you write, they won’t feel compelled to focus on the words they’re reading.

Why Knowing “Your Offering” Is Essential

What is this all leading do? If you don’t know what it is you ultimately hope to do for someone, how are you going to get them to say “yes!” to you?

Knowing your offering, what you do for your clients, makes it much easier to sell. Rather than leaving your offering up to the imagination of your reader, you want to deliver a clear, “this is what I want you to do,” and make responding to your email easier for the subscriber. Having a call-to-action thats leads to your offering is how you sell more product and services.

You get in trouble with email marketing when you do not have a purpose for communicating and you operate out of hoping that someone will respond.

Clarify what it is you offer and write emails that lead readers to hire you for your offering.

Clarify what it is you offer and write emails that lead readers to hire you for your offering.Click To Tweet

Marketers Are Not Talking About Email but They Are All Using It

Good marketers know their why, their audience and their offering and email is a way for them to go directly to their customer base with clear value proposition. It’s hard to talk about effective email marketing without clarifying these three essentials – but once you do find clarity, success follows shortly thereafter.

That success is the reason why marketers are still using email despite not talking about.