The 90’s Marketing “Fad” That Never Went Away

In the eyes of some marketers, email may seem dated. And on the surface, you might see why, with so many users having migrated to Social Media as their primary communication channel. They’ll put their birthdays on Facebook, update where they work on LinkedIn, post pictures of their meals on Instagram etc. That seems like a lot of information, but that’s only surface level. This can all be boiled down to a simple address – specifically, an email address.

Email addresses are needed for nearly every meaningful transaction online. Want to use a streaming service like Netflix/Hulu/Youtube? You’re going to need to make an account and verify your email. Feeling a bit like ordering out? You’re going to need a verified email. Your job assigns you a specific email, you likely have your own personal email, even universities assign email addresses to their students. It is the base code, the primordial soup, for nearly all online presence.

How Effective Is Email?

In 2020, email marketing revenue stood at 7.5 billion U.S. dollars, and by 2023, this figure is set to cross the 10-billion-dollar threshold. Few, if any, other channels can compare with email marketing’s average return on investment, and seeing that companies can expect up to 45 U.S. dollars for every ad dollar spent, there is no doubt why it has stayed so effective all these years.

In fact, email marketing remains one of the most popular digital marketing channels worldwide. According to Statista research on digital marketing channels, 80 percent of digital marketers polled stated that they used e-mail as part of their marketing strategies in 2020. As of 2021, the click-to-open rate of marketing emails stood at around 10.8 percent nationally. More than two-thirds of marketers had shown that their email campaigns held steady or even improved since COVID.

Why Businesses Continue Investing in Email Marketing

Email marketing is designed, mainly, to contact consumers and facilitate mutual communication. With more and more of the world becoming centered around digital life this is extremely important, not to mention effective.

Email campaigns have the highest ROI for the lowest cost per acquisition. For most small business owners, this is an ideal situation. According to recent research by AWeber, 66 percent of small businesses use email marketing to communicate with leads and/or customers.

In comparison with other traditional advertising channels such as CTV, OTT, etc. the costs involved with email marketing tend to remain the same over time. Even with the introduction of new promotional channels and social networks, email marketing still remains very much in the lead, with over 85 percent of US retailers naming it as the most effective lead generator.

For additional insights into omnichannel advertising strategies, explore our article on digital advertising in 2025 and beyond.

Why Email Campaigns Still Work

But why is it so effective still after all this time? As stated above, an email is needed to create nearly every account online, if you exist in any aspect digitally, you have an email address. Which is great, as email addresses are fairly easy to tie to a specific person who is likely to use this email across multiple platforms. This makes for a fairly easy time tracking and figuring out which segments this consumer may fit into.

Anyone who uses email daily is basically Pavlov-ed to interact with the messages they receive. Whether they are replying to a message, forwarding a message, clicking-through a message, or even organizing their emails, we all look at them – even the ones we might plan on deleting.

The Transactional Nature of Email Marketing

Partially because of basic human curiosity, but more so because email marketing is transactional in nature. It interacts with subscribers, enticing them to have some reaction and hopefully respond/interact.

Using email to direct traffic back to your website/product/brand is a tactic that can only help businesses owners grow and create a good reputation in the long-term.

Brands looking to improve attribution and engagement measurement can also learn more about cross-channel attribution strategies.

Email Marketing Relies on More Than Just Copy

The personalization email offers allows you to ensure a strong and personal relationship with each of your current and potential clients.

Personalization in Email Marketing

By having the option to speak directly to them through their inbox, this allows marketers to be able to be more friendly and accommodating with their cadance to their particular needs at a time of their choosing. All of this is able to occur without invading their space but rather just taking up another space within their inbox.

Personalization of email format has become an important aspect in raising open and click-through rates as well as overall conversions. Consumers find it far more enticing to see their name in the subject line, according to a recent poll by HubSpot.

Retargeting and Promotional Email Campaigns

Email also has the potential of retargeting past consumers by sending emails with coupons, discounts, or gift codes. Simply by enticing a past consumer by playing towards their appetite for frugalness can be beneficiary.

Emails with promo codes boast 14 percent higher open rates, 34 percent higher click rates, and 48 percent higher revenues than emails without them. Some marketers also offer a slight discount or coupon just for signing up for their email mailing list or newsletter.

If you are interested in audience targeting and segmentation, you can also explore our insights on syndicated audience data.

How Stirista Enhances Email Marketing

Not to mention that email is extremely customizable through segmentation. Email databases are full of wonderful information that can be traced back to the users.

Email Segmentation and Audience Data

By using this data collected from subscribers and leads within the database, you can easily create a general idea of what it is your target audience expects. This allows for the ability to personalize the email format to match those particular needs on a case by case basis.

We routinely help clients with improving their campaign content with the use of our mobile integration, SEO, data collected from other platforms, CRM software, etc. – By organizing it, optimizing it, and bringing it in an easy to use space.

To learn more about identity-driven targeting and consumer insights, read our Alternative Data Whitepaper.

Stirista’s Omnichannel Email Marketing Capabilities

But what exactly does Stirista have that can really boost email marketing, retention, and acquisition?

Well, for starters, Stirista was built originally around email services, there is over a decade of work and refinement put into the software dedicated towards email.

We can deliver an email only campaign or work with clients to build an omnichannel program to meet their business goals. We can convert their offline data to online, build lookalike audiences, and leverage other channels, including CTV/OTT, digital, search, and social.

All of this allowed Stirista to work and retain some of the nation’s largest retail and communications retailers for the same amount of time, which is impressive.

Businesses looking to expand omnichannel engagement can also discover more about our CTV advertising solutions and how CTV advertising supports work-from-home audiences.

A Useful Use Case

But this is all conjecture, it’s better to show what is possible through an actual use case.

Retail Brand Awareness Campaign During COVID-19

A national retailer wanted to ensure they stay top of mind for customers due to the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic made to people’s routines and buying habits.

After doing their research and weighing the options against each other, they decided to partner with Stirista. The company wanted to execute a brand awareness program using its first-party data and increase its net promoter score (NPS) by 7 percent.

Campaign Execution and Results

Stirista collaborated with the partner, designed the creative, wrote the personalized email copy, and executed a weekly campaign. This resulted in a 10 percent increase in their NPS with a 99 percent deliverability using Stirista’s bounce hygiene and dedicated infrastructure.

You can see another example of omnichannel success in our case study about driving website visits through omnichannel marketing campaigns.

Why the Campaign Worked

How was this all possible? Stirista uses omnichannel campaigns which have been shown to boost revenue by up to 15 percent.

These campaigns are extremely easy to use and can be built around any email audience or businesses can even plug existing email databases/email audiences into the targeting. This allows the campaign to go even further than just email with just the information from the emails.

Three key elements Stirista leverages are the Visitor ID Graph (VIG), Crosswalk, and Adstir.

The Pillars Behind Our Omnichannel Marketing

Visitor ID Graph (VIG)

Stirista’s VIG gives a deeper understanding of audiences than other traditional site analytics tools. It lets you attribute website actions to your list of email openers and bring that entire audience through your CRM funnel from social to display and CTV.

This creates a much better open rate and brings in prospects that are more enthused and engaged. VIG can find new ways to connect with those who abandon cart and even surface ads with products based on learning, behavior and preference that you’ve gathered through your email efforts.

To better understand identity-driven targeting, read our article on targeting hard-to-reach audiences.

Crosswalk

Crosswalk is designed to match email audiences with in-store foot traffic. Allowing you to geofence your storefronts, points of interest, and even competitor locations, it immediately updates with insights about physical visitor traffic trends, demographics, and trade areas.

Crosswalk Features

• Attribution via lift analyses
• Campaign impact tracking on location visits
• Comparison metrics for friendly or rival locations
• Geofencing capabilities
• Visitor traffic insights

Adstir

Adstir unifies all of these and integrates them together in one easy to use space, allowing for ease of pace with omnichannel campaigns.

Adstir Benefits

• Segment email campaigns and databases
• Organize email audiences
• Control campaign placements
• Manage content types and publishers
• Centralize omnichannel campaign execution

Marketers focused on campaign performance and attribution can also review our Measuring ROI Report for additional insights.

Email Marketing Is Far From Outdated

Email is far from outdated. It still funnels into many important aspects of online/digital life. With more and more people leaving large Social Media platforms, it’s becoming the best way to reach them and we’ve known that for ages.

Stirista is here to help make email marketing and email campaigns easier, optimized, and more effective. Email is just where it all begins!

For more best practices around deliverability and compliance, check out our article on Google’s new email sending requirements.

About Stirista

At Stirista, Identity is our Identity, and we have a simple mission: help marketers generate revenue with our identity-level data.

As marketers ourselves, we know that one-size-fits-all solutions and decayed data don’t work, so we built our modular and real-time OMNA Identity Graph from the ground up to arm you with marketing data that actually works.

You can also explore our Acquisition Email Whitepaper and CTV industry report for more strategies and insights.