Today, more than ever, we’re pressed for time and energy. Each day we start with so many minutes and energy to pay attention to all of the things that we need to deal with.

Many things in our lives distract us from what we want to actually get done. Email checking is one of the biggest pet peeves to most of us – me included. It feels like such a drag.

After swearing to myself that I’d never use email to reach people on a regular basis because of how unresponsive I personally am to it and how overused it seems, I realized that I was leaving a legitimate way to engage and connect with people on the table. Some people actually want to hear from me. 🙂

In fact, there’s some people (again me not being one of them) that actually pay more attention to their email than they do social media. So much so that in the past couple of weeks that I’ve been sending emails, I’ve already had a couple of unsubscribes! Personally I hardly ever unsubscribe from people unless they send too much – (usually those are daily senders and my junk mail tends to grab those after a while anyway).

So what made me realize that this was a good way for me to engage with folks if I’m not the most receptive of it myself? Well, I’m glad you asked. Here’s why:

There are some people who really only get their notifications from the web via emails.

Seriously. They don’t have Facebook, Twitter, or another social media constantly open. Nope, instead, they go to their online email web portal, check to see if anything is going on and if it’s not, then it’s not anything they need to worry about. Larry King recently put it this way on his interview with Lewis Howes when it came to having a phone that can text – “There’s a reason I don’t text. If I need to know it, I’m sure you or someone else will tell me.”

The same is true with social media. My dad is this kind of person as well.

Every cell phone, even flip phones, has email capability.

Unless you know someone that’s carrying a Zack Morris brick or something from the late 90’s or early 2000’s, all phones have email capability. (I don’t even know if those phones can actually use today’s signals or not though, so…)

While there are some people like Larry King who use their flip phone only as a phone, most cell phone users opt to use it for as much as possible. More than 50% (56% of this writing) of all traffic on the web is from mobile devices. People are connected, true, but not everyone has the same apps or use the same social media platforms. Email is “universal”.

People rely on emails for digests of what’s going on from their favorite brands.

When you’re looking to check and see if there’s a sale at a favorite store, are you going to do that via social media, their website, or check for an email if you subscribed to them?

You’ll probably check their website.

However… you probably wouldn’t even think to check their website if it wasn’t the fact that you had been notified by an email of theirs in the past about a sale.

Personally, I know for me that I bought two new Colts hats in the last couple of years because I saw them featured in emails. Had I not gotten those emails, I probably would not have gotten the hats that I wear pretty regularly.

It’s easier for the one doing the marketing to integrate emailing into other marketing systems making them seem more personalized.

Truth be told, I tend to pay attention to emails that start with this: “Hey, Jc!”

Why is that? Because it makes my subconscious feel important. Even though I know that I had to have had put my name in a form somewhere for it come out that way (I go by JC not Jc), I still have more of an interest in that particular email – because I obviously actively signed up for it.

On that same point, 31.5% of US online retailers use the customer’s name and/or a unique welcome message. However, nearly half of US online retailers use personalized product recommendations (44.9% – read marketing funnels) and a quarter of them report adding shopping cart reminders (27.6%) to cover all of their personalization bases.

It’s inexpensive.

Currently, right now with MailChimp, I’m not paying anything to email my email list. I think that this is a great option for anyone that might not have a huge budget to spend on tools when they’re first getting started.

Also, I’ve used other tools like Constant Contact and aWeber, and frankly, I wasn’t too impressed with their functionality. MailChimp has gotten way better over the last couple of years.

However, there’s one cavot that I’m pretty sure using MailChimp has – it has issues getting through spam filters. Not sure why that is.

If you’re using MailChimp and you start hearing about your subscribers ending up with your email in their spam folders a bit much, you might want to consider other options.

The least expensive one that I can think of is ActiveCampaign which seems to have a reasonable price point.

That said, if you already have a course or two and you’re bringing some money in to cover your expenditures, you might want to take a look at ConvertKit – which seems it’s quickly becoming the best platform for online business folks.

Love it or hate it, it’s still effective.

So there you have it. Even though I’m not the first one to use the medium by far (I went a whole year without using it), I’ve realized that even within the few weeks that I have used it that I get more engagement. In the end, if we’re trying to get our message out there as people who want to change lives, then I’ll concede that email is a tool that you might want to reconsider using in the foreseeable future.

Let me know below what your experience has been with email marketing. Did you hate it at first and eventually give in like me?