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April 6, 2007
E-Mail Marketing: Coming Of Age??
I read about the latest Forrester report on e-mail marketing, "Email Marketing Comes of Age" in DMNews Online and was pleasantly surprised by some of the data: click-through rates remain steady (since 2003) at around 5%; e-mail readers spend over 138% more on products they see advertised in e-mail than their non-e-mail marketing counterparts.
However, the line I keyed on was from Shar VanBoskirk, the Forrester analyst who authored the report, "The responsibility of marketers today is to think strategically about how to incorporate e-mail into an overall marketing program and how to reap the benefits of a good e-mail program." Why?
E-Mail marketing is unlike other media because low cost is quickly leading to heavier and heavier use. Diana Dilworth in DMNews noted that the Forester report identified that 94% of its surveyed marketers are using e-mail marketing. While that number is obviously skewed by their sample set, (I know lots of small business who are not doing "e-mail marketing" in any classical use of the term) it is fair to say that the medium is getting a lot of attention. And as I noted, that worries me. Volume in e-mail is hard to "ignore" so it is unlike advertising...and unlike direct mail, it's low cost makes it easy to do regularly.
Which leads to my thought that the greatest threat to e-mail over time remains misuse by larger marketers (I have gotten 7-8 Gevalia e-mails in the last month) and plain old use by small businesses, non-profits and other organizations. As noted in a previous post, with over 24 million small businesses in the US, if each sent you one e-mail per year, you would receive an average of 652 e-mails every day. Overuse will not only force a restructuring of the medium, but it will also create weary consumers who begin to tune out the medium. And THAT, as advertisers everywhere are already experiencing with traditional media, is a REAL threat.
So, what to make of MarketingProfs blog author Roy Young's posting titled "The Biggest Threat To Email Marketing..." in which he identified the threat as "the failure of marketers to "market" email as a communications vehicle to senior management." I know lots of CEO's who will take the raw numbers and encourage increased use (reactive management at its best.) But, the answer is not in MORE e-mail, but in BETTER e-mail. That may be implied in Roy's post, but it was worth emphasizing.
Posted by jcioban at April 6, 2007 5:31 PM
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