If you're in online marketing, you've likely heard the news...
More than 50% of your visitors are now coming from mobile. That's half of all of your visitors.
Meaning that they are browsing your site from their phones. And that trend is only going to increase.
So, it makes sense that Google has recently announced some big changes. Changes related to making the mobile SEO experience in 2017 more favorable.
For example, Google is penalizing websites that have "interstitials". Meaning any website that has a user-obstructing pop-up or distracting window that blocks the content of the site.
And a few loud internet marketers have declared this the death of email marketing.
If anything, this is the year of email marketing. Sure, there might be some 2017 email marketing trends that arise to respond to announcements like Google's, but it's not going anywhere anytime soon.
Email marketing still drives a disproportionately large amount of sales.
In fact, just two years ago email marketing brought in 25.1% of all Black Friday sales online which was more than any other single marketing channel, like social media marketing or paid.
In 2015, email marketing performed equally as well on the biggest shopping day of the year, bringing in another 25%+ of sales.
And that makes sense, because...
Email marketing gives you direct access to your audience.
You check your email every day - likely far more than once per day. Let's try once per hour.
When you're in your inbox, you're being communicated with directly (and privately), without the distractions of Facebook, other search engine listings, or notifications.
It's just you and that email.
As a marketer, the direct access to your audience's attention -- whenever you need it the most -- is not only smart for engagement, but also smart for sales.
Humans have the attention span of a goldfish, so you don't want to compete with a million distractions for your audience's attention. Email marketing helps with that.
It's perhaps because of this that...
Email marketing has one of the highest returns on investment.
You get more bang for your buck with email marketing than almost any other type of marketing.
In fact, stats show that email marketing has return of 44.25x. For every $100 you sink into email marketing for your business you can expect an average of $4,425 back.
Chalk it up to the relationship you've built with your audience that even made getting their email addresses possible.
Your email list is your biggest asset because of these reasons, as well as others.
Your email list is one of the only things you can control.
Like I demonstrated above when I told you about Google's updates, you can't control your search engine rankings. You don't own them. You're not entitled to them. And while you can influence your rankings, you can't control whether Google wants to penalize you for something.
Google's main goal is to make money -- like any company's.
And the way Google makes money from it's search function is through display ads.
Google doesn't want you to rely on your email list to make money. It wants you to have to rely on paying them for ads. No matter how amazing having a strong email list is for you, it's bad for Google for you to be independent of them.
And that's not even mentioning social. Social platforms are turning to algorithmic feeds, meaning you can no longer control who sees your posts on your Facebook page or even Instagram marketing.
If anyone tries to tell you that email marketing is dead in 2017, they're wrong.
If anything, email marketing is still alive and well and will continue to conquer all other forms of marketing available next year and beyond.
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