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Over the past year, it's become increasingly clear - regular old email marketing just isn't really working that well anymore.

B2B marketers that bought lists back in 2007-2010 and mass emailed prospects to try and convert just aren't having the same success.

Why? I break it down for a prospective client who asked the question recently on a phone call.

1. The first reason why traditional email marketing doesn't work anymore is technical. Most company IT departments have separated email blasts from third party servers like Mailchimp, Emma, Constant Contact, iContact, AWeber and others into spam folders.

Gmail - which, according to Statistica - rules the share of voice among personal email users (see chart below) - has separated them into promotional folders, where users don't even find them.

2. The larger part is user behavior and user attention. It isn't 1998 anymore where users read every single email. It also isn't 2003 anymore, where we all used to forward anything funny or relevant to our entire contact lists (before social media).

3. Relevancy - buying lists and then spamming is not relevant anymore to the user. Instead, knowing that a user is on social media, looking for a particular type of content because of their interests, demo or job title, then serving up solution-based content into their Facebook / Instagram newsfeed (where they already are), is working.

Not that you can't email people anymore, in fact, abandoned cart emails work very well. Emails to people that have already opted in to receive your content work very well.

Buying email lists, then expecting users to opt into your sales funnel, does not work anymore.

Producing solution-based content and deploying it on platforms where users already want to spend their time - like Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn - is working, especially for B2B.

For another great article on this topic, check out this piece by moosend.com.

Thanks for reading / watching - and have a great day!

Paul Hickey has created and grown businesses via digital strategy and internet marketing for more than 10 years. His sweet spot is using analytics to design and build websites and grow the audience and revenue of businesses via SEO/Blogging, Google Adwords, Bing Ads, Facebook and Instagram Ads, Social Media Content Marketing and Email Marketing. The part that he’s most passionate about is quantifying next marketing actions based on real data.

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