Good and bad news for email marketers
Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 19, 2008
OK, time for a rare step back from the practical stuff with a little almost-end-of-year homily.First the bad news
Email marketing is getting ever more popular. The trend is an old one, but economic worries are accelerating the rush into email:
1. Sherpa's "Marketing and the economy" survey revealed that almost half the surveyed marketers intend to invest more in marketing to in-house email lists in a downturn.
Email marketing and Web 2.0 were the only tactics where more marketers were planning to increase spending than were planning to reduce it.
2. Internet Retailer's holiday sales survey discovered that twice as many retailers intend to cut back on advertising than invest more. But over half those surveyed will increase their email marketing for the holidays.
As customer attention gets scarcer, we tend to shout the message louder rather than make a better message. That approach doesn't work so well in a consumer-empowered online world.
So when people say they will invest more in email marketing, chances are that means sending more email. Not better email.
So it certainly looks like yet more commercial mail is on its way to inboxes, heating up competition for attention and accelerating email fatigue. Let's hope recent successes in the anti-spam world compensate by removing more of the unsolicited stuff.
Now the good news
Many email marketers are still getting even the basics wrong. Just yesterday, Return Path released a report on the unsubscribe practices of some of the USA's leading brands. Here's an alarming quote:
20% of top brand marketers sent additional emails to subscribers after confirming an unsubscribe request...11% of the companies studied emailed subscribers more than 10 days after confirming an unsubscribe request - a violation of the federal CAN-SPAM Act.
That's top brands, remember. Sending emails after an unsubscribe request. Which means the recipients will see those emails as spam and likely report them accordingly.
And general performance metrics are still in need of work. Consider the new metrics report released by MailerMailer. Average click rates for the first half of 2008 were 2.73%. Average open rates were 13.2%.
You can argue about measurement issues, but fact is that most emails are ignored. I'll say that again...most commercial emails are completely ignored.
So why is that good news?
Because even at this level of performance, email marketing is successful.
So it's successful AND there is still plenty of room for improvement. That's great news. And the flood of "poor" commercial emails is your opportunity to stand out from the crowd...by applying best practices, by getting creative, and by understanding the principles of the new email marketing.
Here's something I wrote several years ago. If anything, the concept is more valid today than ever before...
"Many online businesses will not recognize the need, or make the effort, or have the skills to improve the standards of their email communications. If you can see the need, make the effort and gain (or buy) the necessary skills, then you can break through the fatigue barrier and benefit from your competitors' failings."
Go for it.
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4 Comments:
So it certainly looks like yet more commercial mail is on its way to inboxes, heating up competition for attention and accelerating email fatigue.
I do agree with you, as an ESP I measure more and more fatigue from my clients' lists.
This is even more true when the holidays season approaches.
By 
Anton, on
20 November, 2008
Thanks Anton.
As a timely "follow-up," Stefan Pollard's latest Clickz article addresses some related issues:
Desperation marketing courts e-mail hell
By , on
20 November, 2008
Nice one :)
By Anton, on
20 November, 2008
Improved techniques for email marketing is certainly one way to stand out from the crowd. Equally important, though, is the way that you manage your business and customer email as an organization. If you're not responding in a timely, accurate and efficient manner then your company stands to lose credibility and, subsequently, leads.
There's a terrific service out there for ensuring that vital components of email work flow are managed in unprecedented fashion for small and medium-sized business.
Email Center Pro centralizes business and customer email and then delivers a host of collaborative tools for effectively managing that mail. It's the ideal complement to an email marketing campaign or to improved email work flow altogether.
By 
jason g, on
23 November, 2008
