Did you know the Direct Marketing Association quotes email marketing has a ROI of 3800%?

That number was for 2015.

A couple years earlier they found it to be 4300%.

Email marketing’s catching on bigtime. So much so that the 2016 Email Marketing Insights Study found 86.7% of businesses will boost their email marketing budgets this year.

So yeah, even though email’s the oldest form of online communication, it’s still one of the most powerful.

Why Does Email Marketing Work so Well Yet in 2016? 

You’d think with so many different ways to communicate online that email might go by the wayside. And especially so since many companies use it.

Wouldn’t it be hard to get into someone’s inbox and have them actually open your email?

It is.

But when you know why email marketing works, it’s not such a surprise.

People, whether B2B prospects or B2C consumers, read your email for these reasons:

  1. Brevity (more true for B2B than B2C)
  2. Relevance
  3. Personalization

Email allows you to create a more personal communication than any other form available online.

You can send an email from your company, but it really comes across as a contact between two people.

Or, at least it should if you do it right anyway.

How to Get People to Actually Read Your Emails

With your emails, what actually works? What should you write about and send?

Should you send some useful links? If not, then what?

The top thing you should always send is a story that illustrates a valuable lesson for your reader.

Stories have the effect of completely disarming both B2B buyers’ and B2C consumers’ resistance to buying.

You can make up the story, if you want. Just make sure that you make it clear that the story didn’t really happen. That’s perfectly okay, as long as it demonstrates a point.

You should design your story to evoke emotions out of your reader.

And when they finish your story, they should be able to improve their personal or business lives.

Consider What Your Competition Does 

Most companies send a boring newsletter with some tips for doing something or another.

That’s not necessarily bad.

But, it’s certainly not as effective as telling stories.

Plus, consider that with stories, you always have something original to say. It’s your experience.

No one else in the world has had the same experience as you.

And think of how hard it is to be original anywhere in content marketing.

If you focus on telling stories, you’re almost impossible to ignore. Of course, there’s more effective ways to tell them than others. But that’s something you’ll have to figure out on your own.

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