Now I am recording this in May 2019. And I can say that email marketing is still going strong. And maybe you're listening to this in 2020, or maybe a few years after that. And I predict short of a total collapse of civilization, that email marketing is still working wonders. And you might think, how can that possibly be? How can simple emails still work?

I mean, we have Google, we have Facebook, we have all of these new social media platforms. We've got far more ways of communicating now than we ever have. We don't have to rely on emails anymore. All of that is true. And yet the strange thing is that not only is email surviving in the Facebook and Twitter and Snapchat era, it is thriving. I've got some statistics for you here.

These statistics are great. because there'll be people out there there'll be doubters there'll be haters and they'll say that email marketing Did Facebook kill that whatever? The thing is, they've been saying that for decades, even before Facebook was on the scene, and they're all wrong. So consider this. There are 3.8 billion email users today. That is a huge number that I'm pretty sure is bigger than any of the social media platforms.

And what's more, that number is rising by 2022 is expected to be 4.3 billion users. So as a platform, it's email is certainly not going anywhere. But okay, that's just the number of uses of people actually using the accounts. Yes, they are. Because email volume is increasing. 2017 269 billion emails were sent per day, by 2022, as expected to reach 333 billion emails a day.

So more and more emails are being sent. The most important statistic for email marketing is does it yield a return on investment? Not only does it do so quite generously, but that return is increasing. Because according to some research I found in 2018, every dollar spent on email marketing yielded $32 and 28 cents, which is $2 and 25, higher than in 2017. So not only is that an incredibly generous return, but that return is increasing, and is said to keep increasing into the future. The question you might wonder, is why?

Why is email still so effective? Even though we can send all of our messages through Facebook if we wanted to? Well, there are a few really important reasons why email is still thriving and will still keep thriving into the next few years. One thing, email is personal. I don't know about you, but I go through my Facebook feed, and the ads that I see there. I don't want to see them.

I didn't sign up for these things. It's what Facebook thinks I want to see. Now, sometimes it's a good match. Sometimes I'm interested in what it is. But that's Facebook deciding what I want. With email, you go out there, and you subscribe to the lists that you want.

Which means as a marketer, there is no one on your list who doesn't want to be there, they have gone out of their way to receive messages from you, which means that you're one step ahead of Facebook in this regard. Another thing, your email list is yours. If you're an email marketer, you have your list, you control that. Whereas if you do all your marketing through Facebook, then Facebook controls that if you do all the marketing through Google and Google controls that Now these, these companies have a bit of a history with banning certain users. And you might think, okay, that's never going to happen to me, the people that they ban, they're crazy. They're racists, whatever.

It can happen to anybody, anyone who causes enough of a fuss for these companies, if there's enough of a backlash against you, maybe you said the wrong thing and the wrong moments, maybe it's just complete fabrication. Either way, these companies aren't going to have your back. Whereas with your email list, you cannot be you cannot be blocked, you cannot be shut down, because your list is yours. And if you keep a backup of your list somewhere, then even if an email platform kicks you out, for whatever reason, you take your list, you plug it in somewhere else, and you are good to go. So it's a very resilient form of marketing and your list is yours. You're only relying on yourself.

And finally, it's useful. Like, we probably receive too many emails these days. That's true. It's still one of the best ways to stay in touch though. Again, to make the comparison to Facebook, there's just so much information on Facebook, a lot of it's hidden by the algorithm. If you don't interact with a group enough, then it starts hiding that group from you.

Even though you're still a member with email, unless it gets flagged as spam. It is there. You can read it if you want. You can read it later. If you want. You can delete it, you can.

You can do whatever you want with it. But you are in control as a user of your email experience. And these reasons are why email as a platform and as a marketing channel continues to thrive.