True or false: Email volume has dropped dramatically in the last few years.
If you answered “true,” you’re certainly not alone. After all, that’s what a lot of the techno-gurus were predicting just a couple years ago. It was pretty obvious that Facebook and Twitter were going to relegate email to the digital scrap heap.
Only it didn’t happen that way. According to a TechCrunch post by Peter Yared (CTO/CIO at CBS Interactive), email usage has actually grown. Instead of being replaced by streams such as Facebook and Twitter, email has become its own stream. And what’s the big reason why this digital dinosaur hasn’t died?
It works.
As a matter of fact, email marketing, according to Yared, performs better than social advertising. And despite the fact that we marketers often like shiny new things and cool tools, there’s no substitute for success.
That doesn’t mean that email hasn’t changed. It’s had to. It used to be that email was a cheap way to reach a lot of people very quickly. And the initial novelty of email opened some doors, too. That era is long gone. The well-deserved reaction to spam pretty much killed that approach.
The focus needs to be, not on the tool itself, but on engagement. And the fact of the matter is that people actually like email—if it engages them. It has to be interesting and valuable. Effective emails have to be well thought out and well executed.
The converse is also true. Poorly planned and executed emails will not get you the results you want, and they’ll also undermine your reputation. Here’s a look at seven mistakes to avoid with your email marketing efforts.
Of course just avoiding mistakes won’t get you where you want to go. You need to take positive steps to produce the kind of emails that will engage your audience by giving them what they want. We recently hosted a webinar called Builder and Remodeler Email Strategies That Just Plain Work! And even though this webinar was designed to help professionals in the building and remodeling industries, the principles apply to any industry. So click here to get in on some of the secrets to email success.
Email hasn’t died—and it’s not going away anytime soon, because it’s still incredibly effective if it’s done right. And if you’re ignoring it because you think it’s outdated, you’re overlooking a major component in your overall marketing strategy.
