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This April, my colleague and I had the distinct pleasure of attending UNSPAM 2025, a gathering of about 300 email professionals across varying industries, in Response Lab’s headquarters city, Baltimore. The conference spanned two days and the topics ranged from challenges with email localization, to how to better integrate email accessibility into your designs. The main theme, however, was more intrinsic than directly presented, and that is that, yet again, email (still) isn’t dead.
Death to Email
About every 5 to 7 years, a new social platform comes about, and with each launch the threat that the new platform is the ‘best new thing’ and will replace the ‘old ways’ of communicating, which generally means email. But through all those platform launches – SMS, push, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Vine, Tik Tok and more – email has remained, despite all the threats. And there are numerous reasons why email has persisted, which we explore below.
Control
Email is one of the most powerful marketing tools for a company, and that’s why every company you’ve ever heard of uses it. Whether it is small nonprofits reminding you why dogs are adorable, how the power of your donations could fund that medical breakthrough, or that the environment is worth saving, email delivers powerful messages that matter.
With email, companies can control the deliverability, timing, and content of marketing messages. If the ground breaking sales event starts the 3rd and ends on the 7th, but the direct mail campaign is delayed until the 12th due to delays at the post office, that didn’t really help the sale much. What about if the social media platform you did a large marketing push on decides the content isn’t trending anymore? How do you prevent my below the fold content from never being seen because it got clipped? Your 3am ‘Meatza Ritza’ burrito deal bombed because the platform targeted vegan customers! Email solves all of this. You know who is getting the message, when your customers will receive it, and exactly how it will render in their inboxes.
Audience
The algorithm on a popular video hosting site decided cat videos weren’t funny anymore, and so no one saw that our line of premium pet cookies now come in new flavors. The views were half the anticipated value, and sales of our new offerings were a third under predictions. Stock prices are plummeting, and there are some very aggressive messages from stakeholders in your inbox. Email could have prevented this. You know exactly how many people are going to receive the message, and by using historical data you can reasonably predict the number of opens, click throughs, and resulting trackable conversions. Better audience control drives more dependable data, and produces more predictable results. Having direct control over who will get the message, matters.
Scalability
Personalization at scale! Quick! You need an email for 200 people and you need it to be ready for an event that starts tomorrow. It needs to include their name in the subject line and feature a personalized offer. Scratch that, it’s 200,000. You still need that personalization. Sorry! It’s 2 million. Still personalized.
For most marketing methods, getting these requests in the course of a workday would be panic inducing and you’d need to have a sit down with the stakeholder to explain why it isn’t realistic. For email, however, this is just a normal Tuesday. Regardless of whether the message is designed to reach several hundred or several million, personalized messaging can be produced efficiently at scale, helping your message reach your customers in a timely manner, and with content they actually care to receive.
Cost
Email boasts some of the lowest conversion costs of any marketing method. The current ROI estimate for email is that email generates between $36 and $42 of return for every $1 invested.1,2
Value Proposition
No matter where we your customers are in the lifecycle – Awareness, Acquisition, Conversion, Retention, or Loyalty – email adds value at every step. Want customers that come to you each time they need to make a new purchase? Think of you as a leader in your space? Or remind them of the value you add to their lives? Email will help you do that.
Every message matters, and that’s why every message worth delivering deserves an email.
With enterprise-level expertise in CRM and loyalty marketing strategy and communications, working with Response Labs puts your business in the best hands possible. Reach out and let’s talk about how we can help you.
