The email marketing community has to do a better job of educating our colleagues. Some email marketers understand the full potential of using technology to improve the effectiveness of email marketing, but many email marketers do not understand, or are not interested. Some times its because marketers come from a traditional marketing background and they are not fully aware of what kinds of advantages technology can provide. Some other users only see email as an extremely low cost alternative to other forms of direct marketing and don’t care about how technology can help them. If email is going to thrive as an marketing medium, we have to help marketers understand how to use technology to improve results.
Some sources note that the effectiveness of email marketing is on the decline (Five inconvenient truths about the state of e-mail marketing). This is partially the result of email marketing’s success. As more and more marketers migrate to email, the effectiveness has gone down because people are suffering from sensory overload as their inboxes are stuffed to the brim with marketing emails that they may or may not be interested in. The only way to improve this situation is to make sure that recipients actually want to receive emails from you, which is where technology can help.
Reducing the size of your marketing list may seem counterproductive, especially when the name of the game for so long has been to grow your marketing list and blanket anyone and everyone with your message. But in today’s marketplace where inboxes are flooded with billions of emails every day (Hotmail alone delivers 4 billion email per day), you need more than just a huge list and the antiquated mass market strategies of the past. Today’s customers demand that marketers speak directly to them with messages relevant to their lives. If Amazon knows what book they want to read, why don’t you know what they are interested in?
Technology can provide the laser-like precision required to get your message through to the right customers who want to hear from you, but like anything valuable, it takes some effort. More effort is not always what we want to hear, but the payoff is huge. Email marketing that is highly targeted to people who are receptive to your message will dramatically improve ROI. Tools like personalization, split testing, triggered emails, list hygiene, data-mining, and other tools that give recipients more control over what they get in their inboxes, will make your ROI skyrocket. The long term benefit to your brand is immeasurable, as your customers begin to realize that you are providing something valuable to them.
One thing that prevents some marketers from employing technology is that the ROI of email is still very high compared to other media. This temps marketers to simply substitute email for some other medium in hopes of reducing costs, which is always a concern in a slowing economy. But marketers should resist that temptation and use email as a supplement and not a substitute for traditional mass marketing efforts. Email has the potential to usher in a new era of very targeted and personalized marketing that is more efficient, more focussed, and more cost effective. We just have to make sure we don’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg in the meantime by blasting every inbox on the internet.
