Why Email Marketing Is Important for Your Cross-Channel Strategy

Even as newer digital marketing channels have emerged (and keep on popping up) and shape the customer journey, email continues to wield a major impact when it comes to customer engagement. Beyond demonstrating staying power, email delivers incredible business results.

In this article, we’ll share even more reasons why email marketing is important for strengthening both customer relationships and financial KPIs.

3 Reasons Why Email Marketing Is Important

This year, as part of our annual analysis of the worldwide state of customer engagement, we studied the interactions of 9 billion users with nearly 1,000 customers that use the Braze customer engagement platform and looked at how various marketing channels influence outcomes across customer activation, monetization, and retention. The findings from this research, part of our 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review, confirm what we’ve seen year after year—email marketing is a powerful channel for connecting with customers, encouraging repeat activity and purchases, and delivering value over time.

Here are the key takeaways:

1. Email marketing campaigns boost customer engagement

Customers who receive email campaigns are much more likely to engage than those who don’t receive emails from a brand and even more likely to engage than those who receive no marketing messages at all. From sending welcome campaigns and onboarding campaigns to free-trial campaigns and app download campaigns, brands have the potential to drive sessions per user by 69%, compared to sending campaigns via other channels (but not email) and by 15.43X, compared to sending no outreach at all.

(Be sure to check out the Braze Email Inspiration Guide for examples of effective customer activation campaigns you can send via email.)

2. Email marketing campaigns increase monetization achievement against KPIs

Email’s impact doesn’t stop at the top of the funnel. Yes, well-designed email marketing drives opens, clicks, and sessions, but the potential of this channel doesn’t end there. Email campaign recipients are 89% more likely to buy compared to customers who receive campaigns via other channels and 19.5X more likely to buy compared to customers who receive no outreach at all.

3. Email marketing campaigns increase user lifetimes

When brands add email marketing to their campaign channel mix, they’re better positioned to increase user retention. Email subscribers have 81% longer user lifetimes compared to customers who receive marketing via other channels and 9.63X longer user lifetimes compared to customers who receive no outreach at all.

Winning Cross-Channel Email Campaigns to Boost Activation, Monetization, and Retention

Email has proven to be a versatile vehicle for increasing engagement, monetization, and retention on its own, but it’s possible for brands to get even more mileage out of this powerhouse.

In fact, as part of our 2024 Global Customer Engagement Review and the analysis we conducted of billions of customer interactions across hundreds of brands as part of the study, we found out how leveraging email marketing alongside other marketing channels can amplify outcomes across user sessions, buyer rates, purchases per user, repeat buyer rates, user lifetimes, and rolling retention. Take the winning combination of email plus mobile push notifications. These two together drive sessions per user by an impressive 2X compared to email alone. And email plus SMS marketing boosts purchases per user by 1.1X compared to email alone.

How to Maximize Your Email Marketing with a Cross-Channel Engagement Strategy

Check out our new guide Mix and Match: Supercharge Engagement, Monetization, and Retention with Cross-Channel Experiences for more insights on how different channel combinations impact engagement, monetization, and retention, and how to optimize your customer engagement results channel by channel.