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 :-)
May 31, 2014
I agree with you, the email is dead as a primary campaign but it is secondary tool for follow up on Social Media campaigns
Jun 1, 2014
Or for follow up after offline contact, such as network meetings. Not sure I agree about primary campaign use; if you have a warm list of regular customers, it works, like the wine sellers above
May 31, 2014
I guess it depends on the contents of the email and the people receiving the emails. I found more responses on social media rather than email. In my opinion, when people are going through email in my industry, they go through the ones they are waiting for as a reply or to reply to. Whereas, when they are on social media they are interested at looking at other stuff and come across your ad. I say again it depends on the industry.
May 31, 2014
I don't think that is true. My approach is to personalize the message. Create a message for that individual rather than using the mass strategy that most people use.
May 31, 2014
I disagree, if you are authentic and build a relationship with clientele email can be a powerful marketing tool. For example I have built database of VIP customers as a wine club. They would receive a personal message from the wine maker lain with the release and first opportunity sales date before the average public. I moved a lot of wine this way. The key is authentic personal content. Canned templates are spam, junk mail and mostly filtered.
May 31, 2014
To promote my own business and my photography, email is very much alive. I have a targeted list, use it sparingly and send brief communications that always feature a way to learn more about the subject. There is nothing more annoying to me than a self-important blog. Plenty of them are pretentious, long winded and unneeded rambling. That said, I subscribe to those of interest to me and ignore those of no interest.
May 30, 2014
I agree with you Jamie. You can do everything with a blog that you can do with email. The problem with email marketing these days is not the quality of your own content, but the sheer quantity of spammers out there. People are a lot more savvy about reporting spam and enough people do this, you can get your IP blacklisted which can of course negatively affect both your brand and your SEO.
Marketers have to constantly evolve and push boundaries, most have moved on from email marketing to other engagement options.
Jun 1, 2014
I believe what Jamie was getting at is that you could write the best email in the world and nobody would open it. Resources are better spent elsewhere. I guess for marketers that don't want to spend money, it's one of the only viable alternatives, but in terms of time spent on it, I can easily multiply my income by a factor of 10 by doing something else.
May 30, 2014
I have done e-mail marketing before and gone to seminars about it and it depends. If you send mass e-mails to random people than you will have less than a .08% response rate and basically ineffective. E-mail that are newsletters or are very personal are effective. I think Rachel P. has a point in that quality and context matter.
I would say it has decreased in effectiveness over the past decade and there are many other marketing strategies that get better results.
May 30, 2014
Disagree with the blanket segment. It depends on the quality of your list (how close are your "fans") and the customer segment you're trying to reach.
I wouldn't use e-mail campaigns much to launch a "super-cool" new tech or sports gadget aimed at teens & 20-somethings. But I would to keep in touch if my organization is more mainstream and targets a wide range of customers (especially anyone 35+).
Jun 1, 2014
Actually the 20 somethings can be engaged if an email is interactive, containing video for instance and having clickable links to eg social media
May 30, 2014
I agree - most types of it are or should be. My spam filters catch most, if not all of it, so I don't even see it. I'm honestly not sure why so many continue email campaigns with purchased lists or to a group of random people they think may want their services. If I don't know you, I'm not opening it and I don't feel I've missed any amazing opportunity.
The latest seems to be marketing through LinkedIn Inmails - that annoys me most and I am all too happy to block the person and report the spam.
Marketing via email to your current customers or to people who sign-up with you for it is another story and certainly can be worthwhile.
Hmmm.... Perhaps quality is much more important than quantity. Was it really sent to your target market?