Every 6-12 months there feels to be a wave of trepidation about email marketing. Whether it be across LinkedIn posts, Deep into Reddit forums or literally on the edge of your own seat hoping fortunes change, there’s a united concern – Is email marketing dead?
And every single time, the answer reveals itself to be…NO! Not even close to being.
Instead, it boils down to the same old thing – adaptability. The era of sending an email out to a cold list and expecting vast numbers of recipients to willingly just hand over their details first time isn’t over, it just requires a bit more work and thought to get through some freshly laid barriers.
Firstly, human behaviour has changed. Every responsible workplace has put their employees through inbox safety training to stop viruses, malware and phishers from success. It’s as embedded into the human psyche as much as crossing the road now.
Then there’s the mail clients who have a responsibility to ensure their users are safe and secure. Huge global brands such as Google and Microsoft have invested resource and built a reputation on doing this robustly and effectively. Responsible marketers respect it even if it feels like our nemesis at times.
But until we work with these barriers instead of against them, email marketing is going to feel like a rough experience. Reframe it – it’s a new challenge to be respected, repositioned and reimagined.
We’ve had to learn along the way to adjust too – take this example for one of our clients.
Their project begins with a classic, traditional batch and blast (or spray and pray) type campaign. Very little segmentation applied and a message tailored to all. Offered free downloadable content as a hybrid of brand awareness and lead generation. We generated a healthy number of leads considering the challenges but the only attribution was coming from leads generated to a landing page we host for the client. The return on investment trend at this stage looked problematic and the leads were high-funnel in nature.
It wasn’t a success necessarily but wasn’t close to a failure either – it needed to encompass the newer era of email marketing to really get going. It needed segmentation, a nurture strategy and proper attribution.
We took steps to:
- Consider human behaviour – Would all of the recipients click a link if they’re nervous to? Some might, but some definitely won’t. Instead, they would do what we all now do, hop into their web browser, search for your business name and find you that way. You would attribute that to direct or organic search as the source BUT this would be unfair to the email template you spent lots of time working on as that was the driver of the web search in the first place – it’s absolutely been influential.
- Keep considering human behaviour – Think about the type of content you would want to receive as a business owner. You’d want to feel like your business pain point was understood and relatable – oftentimes copywriters are heavily focused on the solution they’re trying to sell instead of segmenting out their audience, understanding challenges of each sector and demonstrating an understanding, whilst articulating how the solution solves sector specific challenges.
- And finally, consider human behaviour some more – Humans are nuanced, they like variety, they don’t want to feel pressured or cornered into a singular action to take. We’ve become used to choice and convenience. So if you’re writing a CTA of “Get a quote” from the off, the chances are slimmer now than ever that you will get a response. However, if you send an email initially, that tells your story and provides recipients with a gateway of multiple options they can choose from to visit your site, chances are you will increase engagement. After some time, your messaging can adapt to those people who have engaged frequently and you can use some of those low-mid funnel call to actions with greater success.
This is exactly what we did for our client.
We tracked attribution fairly.
We looked at their segmentation possibilities and found hooks for tailored content.
We used automation to trigger emails to recipients based on their engagement.
We went from generating 500 enquiries across a 6 month period to 250 enquiries across a period of 1.5 months – at that rate we’d achieve 1000 enquiries in 6 months, an improvement of 2x. A great result in a supposed tough time for email marketing.
Email isn’t dead but some practices are outdated. If you’re ready to start seeing more success and adopting newer strategies to do so, contact us today.
