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Email Lives
by Hannah Paramore in Media on Feb 04, 2009
It’s 2009, wasn’t email supposed to be dead by now? That’s what we’ve heard over the past four years as other technologies emerged that promised to surpass email as a marketing vehicle (RSS? Really?). So why is it still around? Why, after legislation that governs it (see below for my soapbox on THIS), and pundits that pan it, is this advertising vehicle projected to continue to grow every year for the foreseeable future? Here’s what I think:
RSS Feeds are too passive
They are unobtrusive and rely on the user to take an additional action to retrieve the message. In order to be effective, marketing has to interrupt your day. Sorry about that, but it’s true. If you leave too much up to your potential customer you’ll never sell anything.
Podcasts and Vodcasts are too much trouble
I like them for some uses, but as a replacement for email they just won’t do. What if the speaker is boring? You go to sleep. We all get distracted too easily so if we miss the sales pitch are we going to take the time to try to get back to it? I don’t think so. We’d have to figure out how to rewind and those buttons are small.
- Email is quick. Users can scan it quickly for the info they want. And the call to action is easy to spot - or should be.
- Email is timely. We can figure out through testing when we ought to send the email to get the best response.
- Email is quick to deploy. Give us a week - maybe less - and we’ll get a killer email out for ya with follow-up campaigns to boot.
- Email is targeted. Fill out a profile, and get content specifically for you.
- Email is user-friendly. This is the best attribute of all. Customers now know what to do with email. We’ve signed up for a lot of it. Emailers are better than they used to be at sending us the things we want to hear about. And we know how to respond to it.
As you are planning your digital marketing for 2009 don’t fall victim to those folks in the board room who are tired of hearing about email as a mainstay of your digital strategy. Email is still the #1 activity on the web and it’s still the basis of an effective digital marketing strategy.
Promised SoapBox on Can-SPAM legislation.
Have you ever thought of this? We get stacks of junk mail - in envelopes, as postcards and as catalogues - in our snail mail boxes every week. When that happens we have to SIFT through the junk (which is dirty and sometimes wet from the rain) to get to the stuff we want to keep, put it in different piles, pile it on the passenger’s seat of our car, struggle to get it out of the car along with our briefcase, purse, umbrella, baby, walk to the recycling bin, lift the lid of said dirty bin and drop the junk mail in it. And all that is ok with the lawmakers of our land. But we have a piece of legislation that regulates SPAM which can be gotten rid of with your click of a clean button on a keyboard.
And the thing is, the legislation didn’t work. My manhood is longer and stronger than ever and I’m a girl.
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You’re definitely right, email is not going away anytime soon. It’s something that will always keep the lights on at interactive agencies around the world.
What I’m the most focused on now in regards to email is making the design work and the code flow.
All too often I see marketing driven emails that are over designed, causing images to break, making the “view in browser” link one of the more popular links for me to click.
While the web is turning into a complex medium of video and transparent layers, effective email design and copy is still clean and simple.
Agreed! In addition to quick, timely, targeted and user-friendly…
It’s cost effective.
While the cost of the actual designing your email creative can be comparable to direct mail, the big savings start when you consider there are no printing costs and you can get your message delivered for less than a cent per recipient.
It’s immediate.
Email generates an immediate response, instead of waiting for a subscriber to visit your site you can get your message to them when it counts. The majority of your recipients will see your message in the first 24-48 hours.
It’s relevant.
Email makes it easy to segment your subscribers using a variety of criteria like demographics and past campaign behavior (such as clicking a certain link). This way you can ensure your message goes to the individuals most likely to be interested in your offer.
It’s completely measurable.
More than any other form of marketing, email can provide actionable data on the results it generates. Keep track of who opened your email and when, what topics they were interested in, which links were most popular, how many sales were generated and much more.
(Source: campaignmonitor.com)
@ian - I don’t know how companies like GAP, Abercrombie and other large retailers get away with the giant print ad emails.
I definitely agree that email is still a great way to market, but I think we need to start paying more attention how emails look in the mobile environment.
I wonder what would happen if someone started sending extremely concise emails that actually had a strong offer. I’m blown away by the large number of promotional emails that really have no focus or real offer.
Thank you Joel!
You just made this pitch we’re working on 1000 times better.
A giant print ad email might help win a pitch, but showing an email that is well executed in mobile devices, shows strategic insight that not all agencies or clients are thinking about right now.
To download an Apple email at 84k can take more than 15 seconds on an iPhone using Edge. Users typically won’t wait around that long for an email to download when they’re on the go.
Developing a really concise email with a strong offer in it would be a very good test case scenario, especially if there was a way to test the open rate in mobile devices…
I was using the junk snail mail vs. SPAM in a discussion this week!
Done right. Done respectivly. Email marketing is one of the best ways to nuture customers and prospects.
In the past 3 years, the inclusion of email marketing in our services is now about 25-30 percent of our revenue from clients.
It’s trackable (client eat that up).
It’s immediate (results in one day!).
It’s cheap (what client now say’s “money is no object.“).
There are still a lot of 35+ year old people on the web that don’t twitter, facebook or do any other social marketing. Email reaches them just fine.
Kevin
We have overdosed on information. Advertisements and marketers interrupt us with their messages at every turn. Hannah, I might have to disagree that a positive feature of email marketing is its interruption. It is a great tool because of the benefits mentioned above, but most of all because it is permission marketing. Our reaction to info-overload? We block out the interruptions and seek conversations and topics of interest to us and consider all else annoyances. We control the conversation. Ah, and there is the true beauty, the power of email, I have asked for your “interruption.”
p.s. Please keep sending me your interruptive emails, I like them :)
hannah congrats on all your success I assume doodle is the grand baby very cute steve bruno
You are spot on, Hannah. I totally agree. That is why I love writing and using email.