Email works – stories of its demise are premature
For several years I marketed and sold technology products around the wireless transmission of stereo music. Alas, music is a topic every listener (and therefore every one of my potential customers) was an expert on! At least in their minds. They knew that they could tell good music reproduction from bad, merely by listening. And sure some of them could, but most had a hard time separating what was a fervently held belief from measurable quality of music. It took a while to develop a vocabulary and a script to ensure that customers and we were talking about the same thing.
Much like Yogi Berra, I am having a sense of “Its deja vu, all over again!” Only this time it’s email marketing. If I had a nickel for every time I heard a prospective customer say, “I get too much email – I never read that stuff,” I’d be a wealthy man. The unfortunate thing is all too often it’s a C-level officer saying this. It’s tricky to point out that the naysayer is not the target of the company’s marketing efforts. The few times I have been bold enough to suggest that the client shouldn’t go by their gut but be data-driven, I have barely missed being bounced out of the meeting. However it’s not all bad news.
A recent Gartner study clearly documents that mailbox clutter is only the third reason that your mails don’t get read.
“Relevancy (58%) and Frequency (44%)” are the top two reasons that emails are not read or followed upon. At 31%, inbox clutter accounts for only one third of all unopened emails. All marketers and execs should take heart in the fact that customers value content relevancy above all.
So next time you hear one of your executives say that email marketing is overdone or you’ll never cut through the clutter, its worth reminding them that your customers still value relevance. And if you are an eager beaver like me, might be worth containing your exciting missive to once a month.