Like Cher, political arguments on social media and the Fast and the Furious franchise, email never goes away. And there’s a good reason we’ve all been sending, receiving and reading emails for 20 plus years – it works. While email may not be the sexiest marketing channel, it’s effective, inexpensive and drives some of the best marketing results you can ask for.

It’s personal

While social brought the promise of personal brand-to-customer communication, it’s still really a one-to-many channel. Email is the one true one-to-one marketing channel. Whether it’s a prospect or an existing customer, you can effectively test messages and change the cadence, length and tone according to what your customer data tells you.

It’s cheap.

Well, relative to other channels, it’s at least inexpensive. Testing billboards and TV spots is expensive. Testing email is not. You can create templates and then blast out 1, 3 or 5 touch emails to advance your message or retarget off of site visits so your audience only receives messages that are relevant to them and where they are at in the purchase funnel.

It’s both an acquisition and retention tool.

Email provides a great opportunity to keep talking to your existing customers, but it also delivers when it comes to acquisition. Anyone can ignore an ad, but no one ignores their inbox as its engrained in our digital lives. There’s no simpler way to acquire new customers or nurture leads and hand raisers. Next time you need to effectively connect to your audience, think more about email. While it’s easy to be tempted by the latest social media channel or someone is trying to sell you on an expensive media opportunity, remember that email continues to work hard.