Email Marketing: As 'New' as Social Media

Here we were, thinking email marketing was one of the more senior proponents of on-line advertising when we heard 45% of marketers see it as a ‘new marketing automation solution’. It was almost as if we’d travelled back in time to 1997.

The findings of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council’s Marketing Outlook 2009 also states that 33% of marketers think social media and on-line communities will become new paths for them as well. This made us wonder: how has email marketing become ‘new’ all of a sudden?

The truth is - it’s not new at all (we’ve been providing email marketing services for over 12 years), but a couple of factors may have slowed down its adoption on a wider scale. The most likely culprits are:

• Spam prejudice – email marketing has sometimes been compared non-too favourably with spam, even though they are very different to one another. Now, thanks to established CAN-SPAM compliance regulations and best practices, email is viewed as a legitimate marketing channel
• Pre-recession economy – constrained marketing budgets have forced marketing officers to re-evaluate how effective their existing strategies (print, radio and TV) and look for alternatives with a higher return on investment (ROI) i.e. email marketing

It’s also possible that the news headlines ‘social media’ has been gathering for itself recently have been rubbing off on email marketing too (email being another social channel for friends and family to keep in touch with one another).

These factors combined have led to more marketing officers deciding to make the jump to email marketing, hence, ‘new marketing automation solution’. But although email marketing isn’t ‘new’ in the literal sense of the word, perhaps there are ways we can reinvent it and make it a new experience for those on our contact lists. These could involve:

• Adopting new ‘creative’ approaches – experimenting with copy, messaging, imagery and design to tap into users’ emotions as well as needs
• Using behavioural targeting to make messages even more relevant – leaving recipients feeling as though they are having a one-to-one relationship with the sender
• Giving recipients a reasons to ‘forward to a friend’ and ‘share with their networks’ with widgets, videos and humour, making email a really social channel

Although email marketing isn’t new, we’re confident it can enter a new phase of innovation, rising to meet the challenge of tighter marketing budgets and increased competition. Just because email marketing is an old dog on the on-line advertising scene, doesn’t mean it can’t learn some new tricks.