For years, marketing and tech experts have been predicting the end of email. It hasn’t happened yet, and it seems increasingly unlikely it ever will.

In fact, just the opposite is occurring. Look at today’s email marketing stats and you’ll see that email is flourishing, growing faster than predicted.

Still, email has changed. Long gone are the days when it had the world of directed, online communication all to itself. Now it shares the stage with chat, instant messaging, search marketing, social media and more. Because of that, email’s role in the marketing mix has been redefined.

For marketers and branders, it’s critical to adapt to these new realities. That means taking advantage of capabilities—for automation, segmentation, mobile responsiveness and dynamic personalization—that enable email to do what it does best: deliver high-value, targeted messages that consumers see not as intrusions but as welcomed opportunities for engagement.

A proven way to do that—and to drive up email response rates—is to take advantage of the powerful templating and personalization capabilities of Templafy.

Email marketing stats

But before we get to exactly how Templafy can assist with email marketing, let’s look at a few stats on email marketing that demonstrate just how alive and kicking email really is:

Here are some stats about email marketing, from Radicati Group, the premier analyst in the messaging area:

Email marketing stats 2016: over 2.6 billion email users sending over 215.3 billion emails

Email marketing stats 2017: over 3.7 billion email users sending over 269 billion emails

Email marketing stats 2018: over 3.8 billion email users sending over 281 billion emails

As you can see, growth has leveled off somewhat. But the bigger story is how much the growth of email has consistently exceeded expectations:

Four years ago, Radicati predicted that there would be 2.8 billion email users by 2018. They were short by over a third. And by the way, those more than 3.8 billion email users represent a larger group than users of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter combined.

Four years, Radicati estimated that there would be 228 billion emails sent per day by 2018. Again, email outperformed, this time by more than 20 percent: the total number of emails sent per day is now estimated at 281 billion.

Email may lack some of the cachet of other channels but look at almost any stats on email marketing and you will see that it delivers. Campaign Monitor, which provides email marketing services, put together some email marketing effectiveness stats. Collectively they deliver a compelling picture of the benefits of email marketing:

• Average click-through rates of emails are around 3% (of total recipients), whereas the average click-through rate from a tweet is around 0.5%.
• Email marketing produces 174% more conversions than social media.
• For every $1 spent on email marketing, the average return on investment is $44.

A head-to-head comparison of how email and other channels drove sales over the 2017 Black Friday / Cyber Monday period on the Shopify ecommerce platform showed that…you guessed it: email trounced search, direct mail and social media in driving conversions.

And you get the same story when you look at b2b email marketing stats. According to Statistica, more than half of b2b marketers say email is their most effective lead generation tactic.

Read next: Nightmare sign-off scenarios: why you need to start using email signature software

Changes in how email is used

So, email marketing analytics show that email is pervasive. It’s powerful. It delivers real results. Unfortunately, not just any email will do. It’s critical that marketers and branders understand this and update their email strategies accordingly.

Twenty years ago, when email was essentially the only knife in the proverbial communications drawer, people used it for everything. It was how family and friends stayed in touch and how marketers communicated just about any message. Inboxes in those days overflowed with family photos and scores of anonymous marketing appeals. Consumers resigned themselves to email spam.

Fast forward to 2018, there’s been a technologic and cultural shift. Friends are likely to be somewhat apologetic about “clogging up your inbox” and now use social media for all those photos.

In marketing, the spammers are held back by junk filters and responsible marketers think carefully about which medium to use. A branding effort that years ago might have been done via email is today more likely to be executed via search ads. A routine announcement might be Tweeted or blogged.

In effect, the bar has been raised on when and how emails are used. In part because it remains at the heart of business communication, your email inbox is not a place where you expect to find just any information, it’s where you get information that’s designed specifically for you. When you get an email today, you expect that the person or organization sending it has a good reason for doing so. Again, the email marketing stats tell the story according to Campaign Monitor:

• Personalized emails (i.e., those with a subject line direct at you personally) are 26% more likely to be opened.
• Transactional emails (those sent to you based on your transaction or interaction with a web app) generate six times the revenue of other emails.

Marketers who understand that are responding by adapting their email marketing strategies. To launch the best email marketing campaigns, they are focusing on delivering highly targeted, personalized communications and using automated tools like Templafy to make it happen.

Templafy is used by companies all over the world to streamline and control the way documents are produced. Those documents might be reports, contracts, presentations or emails…especially emails used for marketing.

How Templafy can assist with email marketing

Templafy integrates with both Office 365 and Outlook applications making centrally managed email signatures, marketing campaigns and best-practice text elements easily available to all employees. This makes it simple to launch a sophisticated email campaign and maintain a consistent brand throughout all company emails. Wondering how to do email marketing with Templafy? Here’s an example:

Imagine you are planning the launch of a new service across a range of geographic regions. You have teams of consultants and sales reps in each region and you want them to personally reach out to their customers and prospects. You want a consistent overall brand message, but one that’s tailored to the needs of each region. For example, within each region, there will be different pricing, different promotions and legal disclaimers. In the end there might be scores of variations on the same basic email.