Email marketing remains one of the most powerful ways for bloggers to build meaningful relationships with their audience, drive more traffic and revenue, and own an asset that can pay dividends for years.
Yet many bloggers, especially beginners, hugely overlook or underestimate the value of prioritizing email list building from day one.
In this exhaustive, 10,000+ word guide, we’ll breakdown exactly why email needs to be central part of your blogger toolkit, then provide a step-by-step blueprint for growing and monetizing an email list tailored to your unique needs.
You’ll walk away confident and equipped to start implementing high-return email campaigns that outperform social media. Let’s dive in!
Why Email is Still King: Convincing Stats
Email has faced its fair share of naysayers and death sentences over the past decade.
Yet it still continues growing in both total users and marketing ROI year over year according to data.
Consider this:
- 4.3 billion email users globally as of 2022, up from 3.8 billion in 2018 per Radicati Group
- Email boasts over 3X more monthly users than the world’s largest social media platform, Facebook
- Over 75% of U.S. adults maintain personal email accounts
What about email engagement you ask?
Well, email open rates across all industries averaged around 20% in 2022 based on benchmarks from Mailchimp. Of course, rates vary significantly based on your audience and email content/timing.
Similarly, click-through-rates (CTR) come in around 2.9% on average according to Mailchimp data…again fluctuating based on your unique situation.
But how do these engagement metrics compare to channels like social media networks?
Let’s look at Twitter for example:
- Average Twitter click-through-rate = 0.055%
- Top accounts see approx 0.25% max click through rate
As you can see, typical email engagement blows Twitter out of the water. This example holds consistent across other social platforms too that similarly struggle driving meaningful clicks externally.
The above are just a sampling of stats indicating email is far from fading away or seeing waning interest from audiences. Just look at this forecast of worldwide email usage from Statista pointing to over 4.3 billion accounts by 2025:
With engagement rates remaining strong and total addressable audience continuing to expand, it paints a clear picture…
Email is absolutely still a vital way bloggers should be connecting with their audience in 2023 and beyond.
These assumptions hold even more weight when looking at monetization and revenue generated from email followers vs. social fans.
Let’s explore that next.
Email Conversions and ROI Crush Social Media
Thus far we’ve established:
- Total email users are NOT declining but rather steadily rising still
- Engagement metrics like open and click through rates for email consistently outpace social media
Very compelling reasons for bloggers invest in building owned email subscriber lists!
But perhaps the MOST convincing case is the revenue stats…
In 2022, email marketing was expected to drive over 20% of total online orders according to Insider Intelligence research:
This monetization difference remains consistent even amongst bigger brands who heavily invest in Facebook, Instagram and TikTok ads.
Take this analysis from ecommerce experts Nosto:
“When brands were asked about sales directly attributed to different traffic channels, the largest portion once again came from email. Email accounted for 28% of sales, while paid search delivered 26%, organic search 25%, referral 8%, social 5%, and direct 4%.”
So despite far more modest audiences than Facebook or influencers, email still does the heavy lifting for conversions and sales thanks to unparalleled trust and relationship building.
And that high-performance holds up for content creators adopting the paid community model as much as ecommerce sellers.
If we just narrow our comparison to social…
- Typical email CTR of 2-3%
- Facebook feed CTR = 0.9%
- Twitter CTR around 0.25% as mentioned earlier
With 3-12X greater engagement potential, email crushes social media across every meaningful monetization metric.
This remains true even as video and ephemeral content explodes on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram Reels capturing short attention spans.
Plain old text email somehow still cuts through the noise effectively to drive clicks, opt-ins and sales where other flashy new formats fall short.
Perhaps no statistic sums up this revenue-driving power of email better than its average return on investment (ROI)…
For every $1 spent on email marketing, marketers see an average return of $42!
This staggering 3,900% average ROI crushes every other digital channel:
- SEO = $20 ROI on average
- Social media marketing = $5.20 ROI on average
So while YouTube ads or Facebook spheres may feel sexier, email marketing‘s outstanding ROI usually wins the day.
And we see this proven repeatedly in the blogger space with creators building massive six-figure plus incomes solely from email subscriber lists of just 20-50,000 highly engaged followers.
All signs clearly point to email marketing remaining a reliable, high-performing channel for years ahead VS social media narrowly playing a reinforcement role.
Let‘s recap key insights before moving onto building your own list:
Key Email Marketing Takeaways for Bloggers
- Rapidly growing global audiences – 4.3 billion+ accounts strong
- Engagement metrics consistently outperform social media
- Conversions and sales directly attributed to email top search, social media and other channels
- Benchmark ROI of $42 for every $1 spent crushes all other options
Give the above, bloggers would be utterly foolish not to dedicate real time, energy and budget towards harnessing email as part of their overall content and community building strategy.
It‘s simply tablestakes for profitable blogging in 2023.
Now let‘s tackle the good stuff and actually walkthrough exactly how to start building your email list from scratch…
