Is email marketing dead?

If like me you have received over sixty badly designed and poorly targeted emails this week alone, you could be forgiven for wishing email marketing actually was on its way out! Thank goodness that someone created the unsubscribe button!

The great advertising campaigns that we all remember are the relevant and unexpected ideas that were thoroughly thought through and beautifully executed. It’s not the cheap and tacky advertisements, devoid of an idea and produced for nothing, that will ever spring to mind or build brand loyalty.

At last years DMA Conference in Las Vegas one of the topics was indeed ‘is email marketing dead’? The short answer was of course, no, it’s not dead, but if it is to be effective, it needs to reinvent itself. It needs to be innovative and relevant to the target. Yes, that’s you and me!  And that doesn’t mean vaguely relevant, but bang-on forensically relevant. Know who I am, and know what I like, and if you are making me an offer, give me a positive reason to respond.

Then, when you have done all of that, do me the courtesy of communicating with me via an email that engages me because of its creativity, quality, thoughtfulness and execution.

Successful email campaigns will rely on customer targeting, segmentation and stage of customer journey. In a recent email marketing industry census by Econsultancy, it is said that companies who are practicing positive segmentation are 95% more likely to rate email ROI as excellent or good.

If you are a marketer, creating more exciting email campaigns may mean spending more time and money with your agency. But surely, at the end of the day, we are all interested in great ROI figures. Isn’t that what matters?

Anyone can knock out a random desktop published email. Come to that any of us could probably write say a medical prescription. Thing is, without the years of training required to become a doctor, if you did write a prescription for someone, at best you would probably do the patient more harm than good and at worst you could kill them! Here’s the thing, although we all have a good idea as to how to do most things, we will never do things as well as an expert. Experts cost money and mostly they are worth every penny.

In the news recently, we are told that we can even make a 3D plastic gun that will fire a live bullet! But, if I was off to fight in a war, God forbid, I would rather take Smith & Wesson professionally manufactured weapons with me every time… not the ‘desk top published’ gun. Maybe one day I will take the 3D gun, but only when, Smith & Wesson or another professional gunsmith starts to use the technology!!

The point is it is worth rethinking your current email campaign to make sure that it addresses all of the issues mentioned? Rather than risk it being relegated to the unsubscribe bin! And the same applies to email on a mobile device. In a recent study by Blue Hornet it is claimed that 80% of people will delete an email on a mobile device if it doesn’t look good!

If you are using the right platform your campaign statistics for email marketing will be totally transparent so spending proper money on creative work, data processing and targeting will be instantly measurable and most probably rewarding too!

At LAW creative we offer clients an intuitive and groundbreaking Automated Marketing Platform (we’ll be pleased to demonstrate it to you). But, however good the tools we use, however we deploy all of the ‘dos and don’ts’ of email marketing, however much we rely on strategy and Big Data to make it all alright, it matters little if like some companies out there, we don’t bother with customer engagement and creative presentation.

For a demonstration on the LAW AMP please contact brett.sammels@lawcreative.co.uk