With all the hoopla around the growth of social networking, search marketing and the like, it’s easy to forget that e-mail is still the most popular activity online. Just ask my mom. It’s use as a marketing tool, however, has had quite the roller coaster ride over the years.
Going back to the Web’s early days, e-mail marketing was a dream come true with its low costs and high deliverability rates. Things changed at the turn of the century. With spam running rampant, filters became smarter and penetrating inboxes became much more difficult. The U.S. government even got involved via CAN-SPAM.
Today, with smarter, more advanced ways to block the clutter, while allowing white-hat messages through, e-mail is making a comeback. Sure, RSS is growing in popularity, and will continue to do so, but savvy marketers are re-energized about this old school medium. Rumors of e-mail’s death was a tad premature, apparently.
According to a Feb. 2007 study by Datran Media, of the “most important advertising tactics that U.S. marketers plan to use this year,” e-mail marketing was No. 1 with 83.2 percent, followed by search marketing at 61.7 percent. RSS brought up the rear at 4.3 percent. HRmarketer’s recent survey was quite kind to e-mail as well, highlighting e-mail as HR’s No. 1 preferred method of being contacted by vendors.
I can’t claim to be a pro when it comes to e-mail (although I know a few who are and swear by it), but I can say as a user what I get in my inbox tends to be more selective than what goes into my RSS reader. It also gets read first. E-mails tend to get thoughtful review, while blog headlines get scanned and discarded more quickly. RSS fatigue is rampant (yeah, I know, I only have myself to blame).
Things are bound to change as communication gets more and more fragmented and evolved. I’m still waiting for mobile marketing to take over our shores, for example. The best marketers, no doubt, are leveraging a myriad of strategies. And most signs seem to be pointing to them dusting off their e-mail marketing playbooks and making sure it’s a part of the mix, if it isn’t already.
For more on e-mail marketing, checkout my piece entitled A Word on E-Mail.
Popularity: 2% [?]
August 9th, 2007 at 9:07 am
I’m down on email. Just sending regular email to my business contacts has become a crap shoot at times. Just the other day one of my clients emailed me and when i replied back, the message bounced back from his email server claiming it was spam. Legitimate emails still have problems getting through and I dont feel its getting any better.
August 10th, 2007 at 1:57 pm
I just read an opinion stating that email is dead! It’s hard to know which way to go as a publisher and marketer!
I won’t give up on emailing as a marketing tool. Email is just one of many tools I have in my arsenal to reach my audiences.
Thoughtful discussion, thanks!
Adrienne