Email marketing is a sound investment that is often overlooked by brands, but with smart tactics in place it can be your most valuable digital marketing tool. It's all about building useful email campaigns for your target audience.

MYTH #3: Email marketing is no longer effective because people get so much of it.

We get it. Nearly everyone can relate to this myth.

But people don’t hate email. They just don’t want more junk mail.

Email marketing is more than just pushing your brand to inboxes. It’s a valuable tool to reach an audience that has actively engaged with your business. After all, your audience subscribed to your emails. They want to hear from you.

The research agrees. Email marketing consistently ranks above organic search, paid search, and social media when it comes to customers’ acquisition & retention (Emarsys). It’s also a stunningly valuable investment, with every $1 spent on email marketing yielding an average return of $32. (Oberlo)

If you build an email marketing strategy that focuses on offering customers useful information, it can yield game-changing results.

So, what qualifies as useful information? Just think about the emails you’ve clicked on.

Special offers and sales. Follow up emails on abandoned carts. Even welcome emails, which have an average open rate of 82% (GetResponse), are profitable touchpoints for your audience.

You need to offer the right incentive to stand out. Does your message speak to your customers’ unique needs? Is there useful information, discounts, or perks that make your welcome email worth opening? Does your cart reminder offer an incentive to return to your site and complete a purchase?

Give your reader a clear reason for contacting them, with a clear call to action. That’s the difference between a great marketing email and the unsolicited spam that users hate to see in their inbox.

It’s also a good idea to keep your contact list fresh and organized. The overall size of your list is less important than the number of users engaging with your emails. Make sure you clean your contact list regularly, removing unresponsive or inactive email addresses.

Only sending emails to subscribers who have opened one of your emails in the last 6 months is a safe standard to set for your campaigns. It keeps your campaigns fine-tuned for your audience, and with the right incentives, you’re sure to get results.

This is Part 3 of our Marketing Myths Blog, where we debunk persistent digital marketing myths and outline stronger, smarter strategies to meet your goals. Check out our next post on Google Search Ads in 2020.