Email marketing is alive and kicking

Many in business seem to judge the effectiveness of email marketing according to the volume of SPAM and poorly thought-through sales emails that they receive (or, in some cases, send!).

According to Statistica some 57 percent of all email traffic worldwide can be classified as SPAM and there’s no doubt that most of the money spent by SMEs on email marketing is a complete waste of budget. I’m perhaps not a typical user, but I personally unsubscribe from about 30-40 email lists per week and receive several emails every day from freelancers employed by lead generation operations promising me better SEO, cheaper advertising, faster app development or other services.

However, let’s not ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’*. Firstly, no organisation embracing multi-channel marketing can afford to ignore email. It’s direct, timely, can be personalised in as much detail as needed and unlike many other channels that interrupt the consumer, email can be read, managed and replied to, at the recipient’s convenience.

It’s the timely convenience of email that makes this one-to-one communication a vital consideration for those seeking to improve customer experience. Meanwhile, opt-in email services provide both an ideal channel to engage subscribers with content (onsite or offsite) and gather marketing data. Last year, a survey of marketers conducted by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and Demand Metric in the USA found that email had a median return on investment (ROI) of 122 percent: that’s more than most other other marketing channels, including returns from social media.

The number one reason for taking email marketing seriously is that, for the past twenty years, practically everyone who uses email for work checks their email inbox daily. The number of email users worldwide is predicted to rise to 2.9 billion by the year 2019 (Statistica). Despite the huge fluctuations in the consumption habits for websites, online news media, print media, broadcast media, social media platforms, apps or other channels, the central role played by email has remained a constant: even if the challenge for email marketers today is greater than ever.

The key consideration for any email marketing campaign is relevance. And as with any sales and marketing communication, the task of proving that relevance is incumbent on the communicator, not the brand’s target audience. Assuming that you can identify email users that your brand could be relevant to, keeping your brand relevant to them is an ongoing process that requires data, analysis, creative work, personalisation, optimisation, integration with other marketing channels and the appropriate timing. Get that wrong, even once, and you risk losing contacts from your email campaign. Get that right and great things can happen.

If you’d like to bring your email marketing to life contact me at carringtonm@spotonpr.com