Always under your thumb: email marketing

What came first? The fax machine or the telephone? It isn’t a trick question or anything. I’ll let you stew on it a little. What was your answer?

If you answered telephone, you won’t be hearing a little (Alexander Graham) Bell. The fax machine, or the “Electric Printing Telegraph” was invented in 1846 by Scottish inventor Alexander Bain, with the first commercial fax service commencing in 1865. This was all 11 years before the debut of the telephone.

Funnily enough, we are living in an age closer to the telephone than the fax machine. Though fax machines were the must-have business machine of the 80s and 90s, it took over 150 years for it to be adopted as a de facto standard. It was rendered obsolete in record time by another invention that also took decades to catch on: email.

Email was invented in about 1971, with the first electronic mail message sent over the precursor to the public internet, ARPAnet. It wasn’t until the end of the century that everyone had at least one email address, perhaps something angsty, edgy, and laden with pop culture references at Hotmail dot com.

Though the pace of innovations seems to be accelerating, nothing yet has swept email into the dustbin of history. This isn’t through lack of trying, of course. Microsoft Teams, Slack, Hubspot, CRMs, etc. – they all seem to compliment email rather than getting rid of it entirely.

To be fair, why would you?

Over 376 billion emails will be sent and received daily worldwide in 2025, a 23% increase over 2020 – and 8.1 billion of those are sent from Australia. 99 per cent of email users check their inboxes at least once per day, with 58 per cent of Australians making email their first digital “check” of the day ahead of search and social media.

If a business isn’t using email as part of its marketing – especially newsletters which can be targeted, segmented, and personalised – there’s little fear of it being usurped by a young up and comer, especially when the email advertising market in Australia is set to grow by 2.59 per cent over 2024 to 2029 (cumulative annual growth rate), having reached $370.67 million in 2024.

If it ain’t broke, market to it

In a delightful twist compared to other online advertising methods, newsletters are exclusively opt-in. If you don’t like what you see, you can easily opt out by unsubscribing. This approach allows individuals to tailor their content to suit their preferences perfectly. If the email newsletter doesn’t quite hit their mark, an unsubscribe is a click away.

Regardless of whether the email format is news, special offers, link curation, or digests, newsletter subscribers were a whopping 16 times more likely to be open to and engage with newsletter ads. When individuals opted in, they discover that ads and various calls to action resonate with them much more than those encountered on social media or other internet advertising platforms. Interestingly, a whopping 86 per cent of U.S. adults are eager to receive promotional emails.

54 per cent of brands are busy buzzing in your inbox at least 2-4 times a month, while 32 per cent keep the connection alive with at least one email per month, according to Marketing Sherpa.

Emails can be tailored to each subscriber through segmentation, all thanks to the magic of automation. If someone hasn’t popped by your site (or logged in) for a bit, why not send them a tailored discount offer to entice them back? Feel free to extend your warmest Happy Birthday wishes to them. You can segment users by cat owners who live in Melbourne and buy books on gardening with photos of bushes sculpted into felines (Well, maybe.) If you can imagine it, quantify it, and analyse it, you can make it happen with email marketing.

If your business is sitting on a dormant database of contacts (of at least 100 or so), you could be missing out on repeat business. Email can provide business with 30x more revenue according to email marketing platform Klayvio, and an ROI of 42:1 at the outset. That’s a lot of mail-driven moolah.

Most email marketing platforms will allow you to upload your contacts – to invite them to opt-in, not just spam them of course – and use it for free to get a feel for it. Of course, there are professionals (such as me) that deal in email marketing and strategy – but if you can do it yourself, what have you got to lose?

It’s a better investment than a fax machine, that’s for sure!

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