April 1, 2020

Is email marketing still effective? Today, sending a text seems to be eclipsing the practice of sending an email, particularly if you are in an age group that doesn’t cringe to hear Bon Jovi on the ‘oldies’ station. Investing time and money in email blasts may seem like trying to drum up business with a fax machine. Are email blasts still worth the effort?

In fact there are several reasons why email marketing (still) deserves a significant share of your energy and budget.  The first couple have to do with spam.

Spam Works

You don’t want to send email spam.  I would never encourage you to do such a thing. But it’s worth noting that after decades of universal disgust for spam email, people (terrible, terrible people) still send it. Why? Because it still works. It remains so inexpensive to blast out email across the globe, that even an infinitesimal response rate keeps it profitable. The billionaire Nigerian prince emailing people at random for financial help may be a punchline for 99.999% of the country, but if they get bank account info from just 0.001% of the audience, the ‘campaign’ pays for itself many times over. I am not equating Nigerian spam with the content that you or our clients will send out, this is just a reminder: it remains super-cheap to spread a message via email.

Anti-Spam Tech Works

Why is this a good thing? A significant portion of your audience feels overwhelmed by email marketing and will block your very first email immediately and permanently. But that’s good because as long as you don’t switch email services a lot or generally mishandle your mailing list system, you run no risk of annoying them repeatedly and driving them away from your business forever. Your audience will self-select and narrow itself down to consist only of those who are interested in your message.

Respect the Elders

Does anyone even read email anymore? A 2014 study by McKinsey & Company found that email is almost 40x better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.  Everyone in your life from your IT guy to your pet groomer will tell you that your social media marketing budget needs to grow. They’re all almost certainly correct. But the (comparatively) older medium of email remains more widely used and exponentially more effective than these social media upstarts.  Sort of how Bon Jovi earned over five times more than Bruno Mars on tour in 2013… the classics never die.

Recyclable content

Does adding email mean a ton more work? As the channels for your digital message multiply into different sites, sizes and styles, your efforts at content creation aren’t multiplied proportionally.  An individual but well-crafted piece of content should only require minimal reformatting to serve as a digital ad, a social media post, a web page (etc. etc.) as well as the body of an email blast. You’re not re-devoting yourself to email marketing at the expense of social media or digital marketing, you’re merely adding email back into the mix with all the new stuff. Just like ‘You Give Love a Bad Name’ fits into any modern playlist almost seamlessly.

So dust off and update that old email newsletter template, swap in some new pictures, and flesh out your latest digital ad into a more conversational message. Never stop capturing potential/current customer email addresses, keep the right frequency on your blast schedule, and your sales and customer involvement will be doing a lot better than merely ‘livin’ on a prayer.’

Let us know if Mosaic Media can assist with any questions you have about email marketing strategy.