7 Reasons Why E-Mail Marketing Is So Important

Last updated on February 21st, 2025 at 01:26 am

You probably already know that you should be building an email list. But is email marketing really that important?

Yes. It most definitely is. And here are seven reasons why…

#1: Email Marketing is Extremely Effective

DMA has been conducting research into email marketing trends since the mid-2010s. 

One of the trends that have remained consistent over the years is the fact that email marketing has an extremely high estimated ROI. 

For example, according to DMA’s “Marketer Email Tracker 2020”, marketers estimated that the ROI for every £1 spent on email marketing was £35.41. That’s an insane 3541% return on investment!

And this was actually a substantial drop from the estimated ROI in 2019 which was an astonishing £42.24 for every £1 spent on email marketing. 

Note that £35.41 was the average ROI estimate – there appears to be a significant variation depending on the size of the business.

“Large businesses are more likely to see higher returns (£44.08), particularly compared to small/micro companies (£30.61). In addition, consumer-facing brands (B2C) are slightly more likely to see a higher return on their investment (£38.24).”

It’s unclear why this variation exists, but even if you are a solopreneur and get the average ROI of a small/micro company, that’s still a 3061% return on investment!

Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to aim for average, so we hope that your ROI would be higher than that!

#2: Email Marketing is an Essential Component of the Value Ladder Sales Funnel

Email marketing doesn’t exist in isolation – it should always be viewed in the context of your overall sales funnel. 

So let’s do a quick overview of what we believe to be the most effective way to sell anything online – the Value Ladder sales funnel. 

It was created by our co-founder Russell Brunson who then used it to take ClickFunnels from zero to $10M+ in annual revenue in just one year (it’s at $100M+ now!). 

This sales funnel has four stages:

• Bait – You offer the potential customer your lead magnet in exchange for their email address. 
• Frontend – You offer the potential customer your least expensive and least valuable product or service. 
• Middle – You offer the customer a more expensive and more valuable product or service. 
• Backend – You offer the customer your most expensive and most valuable product or service. 

Ideally, you also offer a continuity program of some sort, meaning, a subscription product that generates recurring revenue. 

We also recommend adding downsells, upsells, and cross sells to these core offers to maximize your revenue. 

The reason why this sales funnel works so well is that it allows you to:

1. Start the relationship with that person by offering free value
2. Nurture that relationship by continuing to provide free value via email
3. Build trust by providing progressively more paid value at each stage

Here’s how Russell explains it:

This approach to selling online is much more effective than going for the sale immediately. And email marketing is an essential component of it!

#3: Email Marketing Allows You to Increase Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

You can make some money with one-off sales.

However, it’s extremely difficult to build a sustainable business that way. Why?

Because you have to spend money to acquire every new customer but then the lifetime value of that customer is limited to that single sale.

This is one of the reasons why driving paid traffic directly to a sales page is a bad idea. The best case scenario is that the person buys the product and then leaves. 

That’s why it’s much better to drive paid traffic to your lead magnet landing page instead. 

Once you have the potential customer’s email address, you can then sell them your frontend offer via email. 

If they decide to make the purchase, you still retain their email address afterward, so you can continue providing free value, building trust, and pitching new offers. 

All this allows you to increase the lifetime value of that customer way beyond that initial frontend offer!

#4: Email Marketing Allows You to Convert More People Into Paying Customers

When you drive paid traffic directly to the sales page of your product, the vast majority of people will leave it without buying. And they probably will never come back. What a waste of ad spend!

However, if you drive paid traffic to your lead magnet landing page instead, it will almost certainly have a higher conversion rate because it’s much easier to persuade someone to give you their email address than to persuade them to give you their hard-earned money.

And once you convert those visitors into leads, you will probably be able to convert more of them into paying customers. 

This is especially evident when you look at the big picture:

If someone who isn’t ready to buy right now clicks through to your sales page, they’ll probably just leave.

But if that person clicks through to your landing page and gives you their email address, they might stay on your email list. 

And that gives you an opportunity to continue providing free value, building trust, and pitching various offers. 

Who knows, maybe this person will decide to buy something from you in a month, six months, a year, or even several years from now. 

Email marketing allows you to convert more people into paying customers by playing the long game!

#5: Email Marketing Enables You to Spend More Money on Acquiring News Customers

Our co-founder, Russell Brunson, loves to quote Dan Kennedy:

“Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins” 

As Dan Kennedy explained to him:

“Math is the gravity of the direct marketing business. 

Nothing overcomes bad economics. You can have the best funnel but if you got bad math and you don’t do something about that math, you’re gonna get bit. 

Whoever figures out how to spend the most, they buy speed, they buy scale, they buy discouragement of competition, they buy sustainability.”

@russellbrunson

Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins #entrepreneur #entrepreneur101 #businessmotivation #entrepreneurjourney #russellbrunson

♬ original sound – Russell Brunson

As we just discussed, email marketing can help you increase customer lifetime value (CLV), which in turn enables you to increase your customer acquisition cost (CAC).

This provides the competitive advantage that Dan Kennedy is talking about: the more you can spend to acquire a customer, the more dominant you are going to become in your niche.

#6: Email Marketing Makes it Easier to Launch New Products

The sad reality is that most product launches are complete flops, which can be disheartening for entrepreneurs. So how can you avoid that?

Building an engaged email list means that whenever you want to launch something, you will have an audience that you can reach out to.

This gives you an opportunity to create excitement around your new product in the months leading up to the launch and then launch it to people who are already hyped up about it. 

If you combine this approach with the influence principle of scarcity and hold a 24, 48, or 72-hour launch sale, you can make a lot of money in a short period of time!

#7: Email Marketing Gives You a Source of Traffic That You Own

The most valuable traffic-generating asset that you can have is an engaged email list. Why?

1. It’s the most effective way to drive traffic wherever you want
2. It’s an asset that you actually own

The former is probably self-explanatory but the latter merits some elaboration.

Social media marketing can be a great way to reach people. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, you name it, all these platforms can work well. You can use any of them to drive traffic to your sales funnel. 

However, you don’t actually own your follower list, which means that should you get banned from the platform, you will lose that audience.

And sure, if that happens, maybe some of those people will follow you to some other platform, but realistically, you shouldn’t expect more than 10% of them to do that.

Needless to say, if you get banned from a social media platform, you won’t be able to run ads on it anymore either.

This introduces a serious risk. An event like that can be an absolute disaster for your business if your company is heavily reliant on a particular social media platform for traffic, whether organic or paid. You might not be able to stay afloat. 

While the odds of getting banned from various social media platforms might be low, especially if you stay away from controversial topics, you still need to be prepared for that. And how do you prepare?

You do that by building an email list. It’s better to have 100k email subscribers than 1M social media followers. So you need to prioritize your marketing efforts accordingly!

Attention: Copywriting is What Makes or Breaks Email Marketing!

Of course, merely having someone’s email address is not enough – you need to get them to open your emails, read them, and act on the call to action. So how can you do that?

This is where copywriting aka persuasion via the written word comes in. 

We recommend using the “Hook, Story, Offer” copywriting framework in your emails. That’s what we do and it has worked incredibly well for us!

• Hook – Grab the subscriber’s attention with a compelling subject line. Your email will be competing with all other unopened emails in their inbox, so you have to make sure that your subject line sparks curiosity. Keep in mind that the subject line is the most important element of email copy!
• Story – Tell the subscriber a captivating story. No one wants to read a novel-length email, so keep it short but make sure to follow the core narrative structure. Your story should resonate with the subscriber on an emotional level. What emotions are you trying to evoke? 
• Offer – Transition from your story to the sales pitch and then to the call to action. What do you want the subscriber to do next? 

Here’s how Russell explains the “Hook, Story, Offer” copywriting framework:

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