Despite all the changes and customer behavior shifts that have occurred over the last 18 months, email remains the most effective tool for your marketing team.

That’s because 80% of retail professionals still rely on the channel as their number one driver of customer retention. And anyone that makes a purchase via email spends 138% more than the average transaction.

As you begin to pull together your customer acquisition and retention strategies for Q3 and the holiday season, let’s explore why email is still king. And—more importantly—how it can help your marketing strategy dominate the competition, deliver continuous value, and enhance your online customer experience.

Email boosted customer acquisition and retention in 2020

As a customer acquisition channel, email’s biggest advantage is that it gives someone the chance to signal their interest or intent to buy from your very first brand interaction. By opting into your email list, for example, you begin a two-way conversation with each recipient, giving you the chance to start learning about each buyer and collecting first-party data insights before they browse your site or put the first product in their digital shopping cart.

Before the pandemic accelerated the pace of digital transformation to an unprecedented rate, 66% of businesses used email to find new customers. Now, 10% more have discovered how email helps them reach new audiences, a MeritB2B study discovered.

But finding new customers is far from email’s only benefit. Because, in terms of customer retention and engagement, email is also doing a lot of the heavy lifting to keep existing customers excited and coming back for more. Beyond the 28% of businesses that saw CTR increase as a direct result of email, AOV grew 56% and customer engagement grew 76% for companies that inserted personalization into these messages.

3 reasons why email continues to dominate

While we could list dozens of reasons and write thousands of words on this subject, let’s focus on three disruptive benefits email can deliver to help your brand stand out:

1. Email marketing lets you optimize messaging for specific buyer personas.

There’s no doubt about it anymore—email personalization must be baked into the customer experience. Customers expect it, look for it, and will click away from your emails the second they receive a one-size-fits-all promotion. 

Don’t believe us? After combining research with Sailthru to create our Values-Based Personalization is the Future of Retail Marketing guide, we found that nearly two-thirds of consumers (62%) say it’s important that brands personalize their retail experiences, either online or in the store.

If your brand has invested heavily in initiatives to enhance your CX and grow your audience, there’s no doubt that your business stands to gain a lot from email’s almost limitless capacity to personalize messages, images, and even offers to someone’s specific interactions and browsing/buying history.

With a minimal investment, you can set up email marketing strategies that automatically anticipate and serve each customer’s needs with unique, personalized messages that show you understand them as individuals. Making them much more likely to engage with your content, act on your CTAs, and help you uncover $20 or more in ROI for every dollar you invest into email personalization.

2. Email is highly customizable and measurable.

Besides creating individual messages for each customer in your audience, you can also use email to build unique journeys or customer programs that help you achieve your business goals. Just a few examples:

• An onboarding email series often prompts new customers to make their first purchase—an essential step on the road to long-term satisfaction and retention. 
• Lifecycle emails customized to specific stages of a buyer’s journey can draw on loyalty-program preferences to keep members shopping with you instead of your competitors.
• Early-warning signals of customer churn or inactivity can trigger win-back emails that help keep your customers on the buying journey with your brand.

Beyond this high degree of flexibility, almost every activity related to email generates data signals you can use to learn more about your customers, create new email journeys, and make messages even more relevant. Your brand can constantly learn and improve its interactions simply by tracking customer clicks before using these insights to inform future testing and optimization strategies.

3. Emails is both a stand-alone and omnichannel digital marketing strategy.

Email binds your online and offline channels together to create a transparent, comprehensive marketing ecosystem. For you, that means email can support and draw strength from other channels to become more effective. Or, it can support your website, mobile, and cross-channel strategies to deliver a greater overall impact instead.

In playground parlance, that means email plays well with others. It can expand your social media reach, for example, to attract subscribers from a wider range of audiences that don’t regularly engage with these platforms.

Search and email are natural partners, too. Your high-ranking keywords can create more subscriber-relevant email content. At the same time, your search campaign landing pages can attract new subscribers. Everybody wins.

Stick with email to build customer loyalty and engagement for 2022

Marketing pundits are always eager to write off email marketing as outmoded or old-fashioned. But, as current stats show, the channel rises to almost any customer acquisition or retention challenge you can encounter. Going forward, don’t expect that to change anytime soon.