Is it just me or is email marketing the ugly duckling of the online marketing world…? While social media and SEO continue to be red hot topics in communities such as Digg & Sphinn, poor old email marketing barely gets a mention. In fact, if you look at the top 100 stories on Sphinn right there’s not a single story relating to email marketing… not one. Here’s a break down of what people are voting for on Sphinn:
- SEO – 23 hot stories
- Search Industry News- 21 hot stories
- Social Media – 20 hot stories
- Miscellaneuos – 15 hot stories
- Blogging – 13 hot stories
- Reputation management – 6 hot stories
- Web analytics – 2 hot stories
So what’s the deal..? Why have digital marketers lost interest in email marketing as a discipline? Is it because email is becoming ineffective as a sales and communications tool? It wouldn’t seem so. In Marketing Sherpa’s 2008 Email Marketing Benchmark report, only 16% of digital marketers thought the effectiveness of email was decreasing. Datran Media’s research is even more compelling, with 80% of digital marketers rating email as their best performing medium. And of course there is the often quoted ROI of $50+ for every $1 spent on email. So I think it’s pretty safe to say that performance isn’t the issue. Hmmm…
Is it because we’ve mastered the art of email marketing? Let’s think about that for a second… Hell no! My current full time role sees me working on digital communications strategies for a range of international brands. And I can say without doubt that very few organisations implement best practices in email marketing. In fact, it’s downright disturbing to see how some multinationals treat their email lists. I hate to say the word spam, but it’s oh so close… And if that’s what the big guys are doing, I can only imagine what the smaller organisations are up to…
Let’s keep thinking… Are new forms of digital media leaving email in their wake? We’re probably getting a little warmer here. Social media in particular is hot, hot, hot! But the ROI for social media simply can’t touch email. Not yet anyway. SEO consultancies are probably the only professional organisations to master social media. And it has taken a lot of dedication, foresight and hard work. Indeed, Jeff Quipp has been quoted as saying he spends as much as 6 hours a day on social media to maintain his kingpin status. That’s a lot of time to commit to a cause, particularly when results are likely to be modest for at least the first few months…
Hmmm… could it just be that email is simply yesterday’s news…? Are we as marketers so obsessed with the search for the hottest new trend that we take a good thing for granted? Quite possibly. After all, pay per click advertising (Adwords) is without doubt the most effective form of paid marketing to emerge on the web. Yet it also fails to rate a mention in the top 100 of Sphinn. I doubt that would have been the case if Sphinn existed 5 years ago when search engine advertising was hot news.
Or does it just boil down to audience. Sphinn is dominated by SEO professionals. So is it really any surprise that SEO is the hottest topic? Probably not. Social media and blogging are closely tied to SEO. Both provide SEO benefits and both are heavily practised by SEO professionals. So it makes sense that they are popular topics as well. If only there were more email marketers in Sphinn. More email marketers would mean more votes…
Oooh. Hang on. There’s the reason. D’oh! It seems we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves. An underrepresentation of contributors means that email marketing never really stands a chance in Digg or Sphinn. Unfortunately email marketers as a group haven’t had the foresight to contribute to the major social media outlets. And the result is a lack of visibility… perhaps even a lack of sexiness in what we do. Given the stranglehold SEO now has on the major social media networks it seems there is only one solution. We have to kidnap SexySEO and turn her into an email marketer…
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
James, good topic here.
I can see some reasons.
Even that SEO theres a lot of intelligence theres lots of hands on. In other hand the truly art of email marketing is more about strategy than hands on (try to google – SEO strategies and Email marketing strategies)
SEO is aquisition and Email marketing is relationship (of course it can be used as aquisition).
Unfortunately the online world is taken for short time and poor management,
Also RSS can’t come a moment too soon. It’s become more and more clear over the last five years that email is simultaneously too powerful (people who read it jump) and too weak (spammers have trained us not to read it) to last for much longer.
It appears that marketers still have plenty of time to do it over, but not nearly enough time to do it right.
Thanks for the detailed insight Lucio. I agree and disagree with you at the same time
While SEO execution is tactical in nature, I still think there is a strategic element to it. Choosing your keywords, researching the market and developing a subsequent SEO plan is a strategic exercise.
Conversely, while email marketing should be a strategic process, most organisations use it tactically to achieve internal and isolated goals. I’d argue that few organisations see email as more than a sales channel. And very few embrace the strategic opportunity of developing customer relationships via email.
Your last sentence struck a chord with me:
‘It appears that marketers still have plenty of time to do it (email) over, but not nearly enough time to do it right.’
Spot on!
Interesting post. Thank you. I come from the email marketing world. Working both from a strategy and deliverability perspective at a major ESP. Email isnt going anywhere. Its earned its place in the marketing mix like you mentioned in the post. But even long time email marketers miss the boat when it comes to actually optimizing their email marketing campaigns and segmentation. Its all about data integration, deliverability optimization, better segmentation, and target marketing. Long gone are the days of blasting one message out to your list. You must build rich customer profiles leveraging customer, marketing interaction, and sales data to drive relevancy. Then you must think about how your mail is being treated to the receiving community ( the ISPs and domains you are sending to). You must manage your brand and the reputation tied to the IP address(s) you are mailing from. If your list(s) are full of dead email addresses, spam traps, and people who are marking your email as spam you are going to run into troubles. And getting blocked at a big ISP like AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo means you are leaving a lot of money on the table.
Its important to optimize what you are doing with email and integrate it with the other channels (mobile, web analytics, social media, website, SEO, etc) to really drive conversions, improved response rates, and sales.
Thanks for the detailed insight Morgan. I’ve done (and still do) a lot of email marketing so I can appreciate all of your points. Indeed, they’re often exactly what I preach to our clients. Good email marketing starts and ends with data. Data drives customer profiling, which in turn drives message relevance. And of course, the data at the end of the cycle (clicks, sales etc) facilitates testing and ongoing optimisation.