I don’t know about you but I struggle to keep up with email, the delete key is my friend. What sparked this post was a few weeks back I ranted about an email I received that read, “You or someone from your company recently visited our site.” I figured if the vendor was not interested in getting to know me and at least know my name, they were not interested in our business.
In the back of my mind I knew we had a rolling email effectiveness survey, those results showed that participants who used Email since 2008 found it effective and saw great results. I wondered if that was still the case, so I took a quick poll to compare. Here is what I found;
I wondered what other people are seeing so I called Jason Stewart at DemandBase, here is what he had to say;
Email effectiveness is definitely on the decline, at least unless email marketers learn to adapt much the same way that search marketers have. Just as the most popular search terms are hypercompetitive, expensive and often demonstrate very limited return, mass batches of generic emails just don’t cut it anymore. We need to apply the “long tail” philosophy of search to email if we want to stay alive, and serve small, specific batches of people with the targeted messages we know that they are interested in.
I think Jason nails it with knowing our customers and serve them “targeted messages we know that they are interested in.” Remember Email is one social media tool in our arsenal. To view the effectiveness of other types of media campaigns click here
To take the email effectiveness survey click here.
To view 2010 survey results click here.
