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Do you think email has been killed by social media? You may want to rethink that. Facebook and Twitter only have 2 billion users combined, while 2.6 billion people have an email address – email is still alive and thriving.

These figures alone explain why email is crucial, but I’m going to throw some other reasons out there to help convince you email is the most important marketing channel.

Recommended reading: 4 Successful Ways to Conduct Market Research for Your Business

Email is the best customer acquisition & retention channel

Email is a very direct form of marketing — so it lends itself to building new customer relationships fast. It also helps you retain customers and improve your marketing funnel.

Email is better than social media for customer retention and acquisition, but have a guess how much better it is…..Are email and social media pretty much neck and neck, or is there a slight advantage to the former? Nope, email’s figures are nearly twice those of social media, as the stats below show:

But it’s not only social media that email beats, it is also ahead of organic search, paid search, mobile marketing, and every other marketing channel when it comes to acquisition and retention. With figures so powerful, it’s clear that email isn’t only an important part of your marketing strategy, it’s essential to it.

Email has the highest ROI of all the major marketing channels

Your business has many metrics for determining success in marketing – organic traffic, cost per lead, customer lifetime value (I could go on). The bottom line, though, is that you want a return on the time and money you’ve invested in your marketing. How does email fare against other marketing strategies when it comes to ROI? It demolishes them.

Email has an ROI of 675%, meaning that for every $1 you spend you get back $6.75 – that’s insane, especially when you consider how cheap sending emails is these days (startup BEE are a new low-cost tool to test out).

So, how do the other marketing mediums score for ROI? The closest to email is SEO, which has an ROI of $2.75 – making email 60% better than the next best type of marketing.

Segmentation lets you sell to the right people in the right way

Marketing is about finding the people who will buy your goods or services, then convincing them to buy them and engage with you for the long-term (fingers crossed). With its segmentation facilities, email marketing makes it easy to find the right people to talk to (at scale). You can split your email list by age, gender, location, buying habits and more.

Business owners using WordPress will need to download an email marketing plugin from this WordPress email plugins list to make the most of their customer data. However, if you’re an ecommerce business, you’ll almost certainly have email marketing built into your CMS (for example, major store-builders like Shopify let you create email marketing campaigns directly from your online store, giving you recommendations on how to make them work). My advice, though, is that you enhance whatever email marketing facilities come with your website by adding MailChimp: it’s the best email marketing software

Lets you ask your customers what they want from your business

Companies across the globe spend trillions on marketing trying to find out what their customers want — but sometimes the easiest thing in the world is also the most effective: why don’t you just ask them?

Using email marketing as a Q&A tool is a tactic successfully employed by companies large and small. Take the example of online makeup subscription brand Birchbox: 

The brand has a “choose your own adventure” style of opt-in, asking customers to let them know what they like when they sign up to the email list – options include things like “beauty” and “grooming.” Birchbox alters what it sells so that it offers customers what they really want.

You can expand on this approach by asking what your customers’ pain points are and what they are struggling with. You can even survey your customers to find out what content, services or additional product lines they would like to see from your business. More than an acquisition tool, email can build stronger relationships by creating valuable two-way relationships with your customers.

Email has the best ROI and the highest rate of customer acquisition and retention of all marketing types. If that wasn’t enough, it allows you to segment your customer base and lets you market to them via their favorite form of communication. I’ll be honest – email isn’t a super important marketing channel, it’s the best.