The health of email marketing is a contentious issue with industry opinion bitterly divided. So is the channel facing retirement or a rejuvenation? Alex Blyth investigates
It seems like only yesterday email was the latest channel in marketing communications; an exciting new way of reaching prospects and customers that meant we no longer needed to spend money on direct mail. Yet that was the late 90s – and to some observers email seems to be rapidly going the same way as listening to the Spice Girls and using a scooter to get around the office: Something that was fun at the time, but has long lost its appeal.
Ask someone under the age of 20 what they think of email, and they might even wonder what you are talking about. If they’ve been brought up in the world of Twitter and Messenger, they might not even bother with an email address.
But is the same happening with business people? Do your prospects still use email like they use to? Do they open anything that is not from existing contacts? The likes of Gmail and Hotmail have introduced measures that allow people to be much more selective about the emails they see. Do marketing emails even make it into their inbox?
It is fears such as these that are prompting some observers to proclaim the death of email. Can this really be the case? Have we already got to the point where bombarding buyers with irrelevant content has so tarnished email that it does more harm than good? Is the shiny new marketing channel of the late 90s already damaged beyond repair?
Email RIP?
To be fair, most of those arguing that email is being killed off by search and social, are in fact providers of search and social services. However, there are other, perhaps more credible, voices who are also tolling the death knell for email.
Gavin Wheeler, CEO of direct response and relationship marketing agency WDMP, believes that in many ways email is a victim of its own success. “Email marketing has evolved dramatically since its inception and now allows for much richer use of media,” he says. “It’s become both affordable and practical to embed video and audio into emails. We can also incorporate personalisation techniques such as location and previous purchases. Sadly, this also means that email marketing is failing due to over use and poor execution. We’ve seen a marked increase in businesses using it indiscriminately. If a campaign sent to 3000 recipients results in 20 responses, why not send out 20,000 more emails?”
This has always been a problem for email marketing. In the B2B world it has been compounded by the difficulties involved in gathering and maintaining accurate data. Wheeler believes the advent of mobile allows recipients to ignore all but the most carefully targeted, personalised and enriched emails, and as a result many of his customers are returning to offline direct mail.
Richard Bush, managing director at marketing agency Base One agrees that email marketing has written its own death warrant, but he believes the final blow will come from a different source. “Too many marketers use it as broadcast media,” he says. “It isn’t. It is personal media – direct, tailorable, and if you get it right highly responsive. Yet many people are still signing up to use email broadcast systems rather than using it to maintain dialogue.”
He continues, “I can see email being replaced with more immediate, even more personal and bespoke methods of communication powered by real people in the form of intelligence-driven live chat. There are a few barriers to overcome but we see on sites that have a choice between email contact or live chat most people choose the latter.”
Smart email prevails
Of course not everyone agrees. There is no shortage of providers of email-related services who will confidently tell you that email is alive and kicking. Yet few of them are able to present any proof beyond their claims that marketers are clamouring for their services. The problem is that since the DMA stopped breaking out B2B email in its benchmarking reports there have been few independent, authoritative sources of information on the subject. The recent publication of B2B Marketing’s Email Benchmarking Report is therefore particularly timely (see below). More significantly, there are many marketers who offer stories of how email remains a valuable weapon in their armoury.
Hannah Roberts, marketing manager at telephone answering service Moneypenny, for example. She says, “Email is alive and well. In fact we’ve ditched direct mail in favour of a fully integrated email strategy. We’ve found that email works best as a long-term strategy, where we’re developing relationships, not grabbing quick wins. We’re putting our personality out there, not speaking from a corporate voice. We’re delivering valuable content not low value, short-term offers.”
Nicholas Green is MD at Printed.com, a website that launched in 2010 and that has so far provided online printing services to more than 10,000 businesses. He is a firm believer in email and has invested heavily in database infrastructure. “This allows us to segment our data into around 18 groups, and deliver different messages with tailored creative at the most suitable time to each,” he says.
“Because we provide relevant content, and we don’t bombard people, we get average open rates of 40-50 per cent,” he adds. “And in February 2012, 10 per cent of our revenue came directly from email marketing campaigns.”
The evolution of email
Clearly, email does have a future, but only in the hands of those who are prepared to use it to its full potential. Martin Smith, head of marketing at marketing automation provider Neolane, says, “Talking to customers, it’s clear email is still the central point of communications in B2B marketing. B2B marketers have just become smarter about using it, borrowing best practices from their B2C counterparts.”
He further explains, “B2B marketers are integrating channels such as social, search, even mobile or call centre activity depending on the size of firm. They are paying more attention to data quality by aggregating and cleansing. And they are moving beyond batch-and-blast to deliver more relevant, personalised content. There is a move as well from one-off campaigns, to longer-term conversational marketing techniques.”
Without doubt the sort of marketing automation tools that Neolane and others provide are helping B2B marketers make better use of email. For example, Sylvia Jensen, director of marketing EMEA at Eloqua describes how her company helped publisher E.Republic resuscitate a fast-fading email marketing campaign.
“In 2008, the company had a major data and sales challenge on its hands,” she says. “It was using four CRM systems, seven databases and a home-grown email blasting tool that did not track opens or opt-outs. Prospects were complaining of spam and ISPs were threatening web service outages due to complaints of spam.”
She continues, “The marketing department implemented our system and now email is once again at the core of its marketing and sales work. It tracks every email it sends, tests subject lines and optimises design for response. It knows who in sales uses the materials it produces and how effective those materials are.”
Finally, Andy Taylor, managing partner at creative marketing agency Outsmart Agency offers an example of the cross-channel integration that Smith mentions. “We executed a campaign for Craven Solutions,” he explains. “It is a manufacturer of medical storage and handling solutions, and so we were targeting NHS procurement directors.”
He continues, “Email reinforced physical direct mail allowing us to track who was opening and responding to the campaign, and so giving us priority leads for the subsequent telephone campaign. It was a relatively small target list and so the client was delighted that of the 92 emails that were opened 25 led to face-to-face meetings.”
The future
Segmentation and personalisation through data is important, as are content quality, timing, and the smart deployment of rich media. Email campaigns that achieve all this, as well as integration with offline marketing, are not dying; they are in fact thriving.
So, if email does then have a future, what will that future look like? Almost all observers agree that far from social and search replacing email they will increasingly integrate with it. So, just as email reinforced Craven Solutions’s mail and phone campaign, so it will strengthen the search and social campaigns of the future.
Bethanie Nash, is managing director of Smart Monkey Marketing, an agency that over the past decade has developed email campaigns for B2B clients such as Thales Training & Consultancy, British Gypsum and Tyco. She explains how this integration will work, “Social media allows you to initiate a conversation; email is where you convert that conversation into a sale. The key is to encourage your social media followers and likers to connect with you through email. Start including share buttons within your email campaigns, and including messages in your social media encouraging people to subscribe to your email. It is now possible to set up a Facebook page within your overall account to drive people to sign up to
your email.”
Just as email did not kill off direct mail, so search and social will not kill off email. Only the most wide-eyed of marketers invest in only one channel. The wisest and most successful will integrate across multi-channels and work hard on using the latest techniques and tools in each.
As Richard Gibson, director of client services in northern Europe at Return Path, and chair of the DMA Email Marketing Council, concludes, “Marketers are always so desperate to keep ahead of the competition and find the latest techniques that it can be easy to write-off the techniques we already have. But there is no real evidence that search and social are taking marketshare from email. All are working together to provide ever greater return on investment for B2B marketers.”
Achieving inbox success
Avoid the spam folder or delete button with these five top tips by Tim Norman, director at SDL Web Content Management Solutions
1. Remember content matters
The last decade has seen much discussion about channels, but most customers are now channel-agnostic and swamped by content. Make sure your content is high-impact, compelling and relevant regardless of the channel deployed.
2. Create multi-channel flow
Your corporate website, print campaign and even social media presence should reinforce one another and provide email recipients with a unified experience.
3. Adapt for mobile
Prospects now access email through their mobile phones, so messages need to be to-the-point. Complicated, graphics-driven emails are often unsuitable for mobile displays. Make every pixel matter.
4. Test and measure
Calls-to-action can take any number of form – from links to microsites, special offers to buttons. By testing these approaches, you can find out what works best.
5. Nurture relationships
Stay in touch with your audience, trends in the marketplace and future opportunities. Never let your email marketing become ‘more of the same’ since this is the quickest way to lose customer intimacy and miss future opportunities. Your value to the customer is based on a relationship, which requires care and attention.
