Email is dead for effective campaign marketing. Agree or disagree and why?
With the readership on email becoming more and more limited, marketers are looking at abysmal click through and conversion rates (if even open rates) on email campaigns. Why are people continuing to launch multi-million dollar efforts annually?
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Oct 27, 2014
I would have to disagree with you. Whilst it is true that email users are far more savvy than in the past, we still experience much higher conversion rates from email campaigns than we do via any other channel, whether that be social media, our website and/or blog, telephone marketing, and print marketing. Email still leads the way.
Think about it: How much time do you spend on email every day? Is it more than you spend on social media?
I think the important issue as some have already mentioned is to keep a nice, clean and relevant list, ensure your content is 100% (content is king no matter how it's delivered), design your template to be user-friendly and clean on every platform and device, and respect your list. Don't send them an email every week. Don't send them information they're not in the least bit interested in. Pay attention to your A/B testing and don't project 'personas' onto your customers/prospects. Listen to them, watch their interactions and then tailor your marketing strategies.
The same as any other marketing channel, I suspect.
Jun 3, 2014
Disagree. Key is the message (subject line and body). Key to the message is understanding your target audience and how to optimally communicate crisply and clearly with a compelling call to action.
Jun 3, 2014
So I purposefully made a blanket statement to see what would come back. 1) I think Segmentation is critical and obvious to anyone who has more than a year of marketing experience and if one doesn't they should perhaps look at better ways to spend corporate dollars 2) I would say that even with segmentation it is important to draw the distinction between "campaigns" that drive new and upsell business versus mail to influencers versus mail to brand new leads.. There are limited successful ways to engage people through email UNLESS your mail types are also segmented and you allow people who expressly want that information to choose from those segments. This is where both customization and personalization become critical. 3) with the choices of other engagement methods today I would put email at the lowest ROI from experience. I am however mixing lots of apples and oranges without going through every mail type and market segmentation use case.
Jun 2, 2014
It certainly is not dead; but yes competition is increasing and the real challenge is to improve your visibility in the overcrowded mailbox.
Jun 2, 2014
My latest email I sent out 60K and had one response. Does it work? Oh yea! What a waste of time.
Jun 2, 2014
All the emails were gathered from my market that I have been in for 30 years. It used to work well.
Jun 1, 2014
Email is viable but there are more options available - some of which have cut into email's share. I don't think email will ever go away but there are more options for marketers that are just as important. Marketers need to stay on their toes to make sure they stay on top of the latest trends and technological advances.
Jun 1, 2014
Email can be a great way to market if you are careful to take care of your list.
If you provide good informational content people will like and trust you. They are more likely to open your email.
If you continually bang away and try to sell them all the time, they will not open your email and eventually unsubscribe.
Jun 1, 2014
Campaign marketers in my views will use all the channels, email being one of them. What is important is content.
There are many fashion retailers that look at your individual surfing patterns on the net and share email with customers based on what they have seen/ liked.
The problem of email marketing is if the content does not match the readers expectation the same results in a spam mail. However if using tech like Big Data, Location Based marketing if one is able to incorporate the same data, email will still be there.
Jun 1, 2014
The point is to integrate email campaigns into your bigger marketing strategy. Spamming people is bound to create poor click through, but remember the best marketers achieve results with emails. Your list has to value what you share and proportions of free info versus direct selling have to be right.
For those companies starting their campaigns, they would be wise to start with a telemarketing campaign to get PERMISSION to send info to and then this opens up room for dialogue with follow up calls. Too many companies email first then telephone, only for many emails to have been binned.
Getting your list to opt in every now and then to continued emails helps you sort out your fans from your luke-warms...
Jun 1, 2014
Not sure if I agree or disagree. I think the mass email marketing is dead. Barely anybody reads those and the conversion is pretty low. However focused and concentrated email marketing campaigns are definitely worth pursuing.
You need to know who your target audience is so research is key. Then focus on only sending for example 100 emails during one week. Why 100? Because the next step is crucial. You need to pick up the phone and call your target audience. By doing this you can be certain of increasing your conversion rate to approx. 35 - 45%. If you follow some simple rules you can have a focused email campaign with a high conversion rate. If you don't feel comfortable doing the follow up calls then get somebody involved with some sales experience. But with this concept you basically take the cold out of cold calling. Works all the time if you do this up to 48 hours after sending your email. Why 48 hours.? Because within the first 48 hours the receiver will remember your email. Even if they didn't read it completely, they will remember the first 2 lines of your email so make sure the core message is in thise. The one thing you should definitely expect: expect that nobody comes back to your email and for god sake don't send a follow up email to ask if they received your first email :-)
Hmmm.... Perhaps quality is much more important than quantity. Was it really sent to your target market?