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Is Email Marketing Dying in Business: Expert Opinion
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Burying emails is an annual tradition. Try opening any top marketing trends, and you are likely to see the advice “leave email, no one needs it anymore”, which is not completely true. HubSpot research shows that each email generates $36 for a $1 spend. Not bad, isn’t it?
Let’s figure out why you shouldn’t abandon email marketing this year.
Will Email Be Killed by Messengers?
Increasingly, the idea begins to arise that instant messengers will kill email. Well, that sounds logical: they are faster, edgier, and more convenient, people check notifications more often than they look at mail, and in general, short messages in 2022 are more familiar than bulky letters. But there are many arguments against it.
Messengers: arguments against
- Dull infrastructure. Compared to instant messengers, there are many programs on the market that simplify working with emails and allow them to be effective. For example, the market has already formed a pool of top email tracking tools, which is a true life-saver for marketing specialists. Unfortunately, there is no such pool for messengers.
- Still unexplored stuff. Messengers are still actively developing and changing, and what works and works great now may stop working in a year. It’s hard to plan long-term.
- Email safety. Email is safer than instant messengers. Email is decentralized and doesn’t belong to any private corporation.
- Email utility function. Messengers are not competitors of email in principle, since the latter, at its core, does an incredibly boring job everyone hates to do.
Will Social Media Kill Email?
Now social networks generate the largest amount of profit. And you can’t argue with that.
However, social media has a notable downside. Like any service from the private company, the social network may sooner or later close, and all the information that was stored in it will disappear. But does this mean that you need to ignore modern trending services because their life is short? No, it doesn’t.
First, consider that different audience use different communication channels. More channels mean more reach. Teenagers need to be captured on TikTok, Twitter or Instagram, and their moms on Facebook. Moreover, different channels target different activities.
Secondly, young people are more actively using new services, whether it is an application for ordering goods or food or a social network for short videos. But the older audience doesn’t particularly like everything new. The email has proven its worth over the years. Services like TikTok are much more powerful than email. However, endurance over a long distance is important here. Apps like this pop up every month, but email has been with us for more than 25 years.
How to Implement Email Marketing in Your Business?
Since we found out that emails have gunpowder in the flask, here’s how to use them in your business.
Step #1: Form a team
Email marketing requires resources – both money and human. In order for your newsletters to successfully solve the tasks, you will need to form a team of several specialists. Different people for different POC (here’s find out point of contact meaning).
Here is who it is desirable to have in the team: an email marketer, he is also a project manager, copywriter, designer (and, possibly, layout designer).
Step #2. Develop an email strategy
After you have assembled a team, you need to decide what and how it will do. At this stage, you need to develop an email marketing strategy.
Step #3. Develop a mailing plan
Now it’s time to figure out what and how you will write. At this stage, it is a good idea to conduct a competitive analysis and see what competitors write about, what headlines and calls to action they use, and analyze the visual design of their emails.
These data must be compared with the goals developed in the previous step. For example, if you want to stimulate sales, then it is logical to write more about discounts and unique features of goods and services.
Step #4. Prepare letter templates
After you decide on a complete mailing list of various types, you will need to prepare letter templates for each of them. Having a ready-made template in which you only need to upload content significantly speeds up the process of preparing each newsletter.
Step #5. Ensure regularity
This is exactly the stage where most plans for launching effective email marketing fall apart. Postal mailings must first of all be regular. At the initial stage, 1-2 letters per week will be enough. So you will not have time to exhaust the audience and leave yourself enough time to prepare content. Don’t forget about segmentation so that each subscriber receives relevant content.
The important point here is not to forget about automation. With the help of email marketing systems, you can set up both sending welcome emails with useful information for new subscribers, as well as more complex trigger mailings, when emails are sent in response to certain actions of the subscriber on the site or in mailing lists.
Wrap Up
Marketers with mediocre activity are trying to supplant the email channel, but it lives on and is likely to remain a useful promotional tool for many years to come. But one thing remains important.
Remember that it is the audience that decides which channel to use. Not us marketers, but the audience. Think of them as people, not data. We often begin to perceive people as data, discoveries and clicks come in their place, their faces blur, and lose their human features. It should not be the reality.
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About Shane Avron
Shane Avron is a freelance writer, specializing in business, general management, enterprise software, and digital technologies. In addition to Flevy, Shane's articles have appeared in Huffington Post, Forbes Magazine, among other business journals.Top 10 Recommended Documents on Social Media Strategy
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