Seamus Walsh from marketing content strategy company VAZT contacted me earlier this week to comment for a blog post he was working on … Email Effectiveness Down in 2010. He shared some numbers which you can see in his blog post, but the bottom line is that people seem to be committed to sending email but feel that the medium is not as effective as it once was.
I could totally identify with that, but seriously wondered if I agreed.
I still send a lot of email. I wish I had more time to be strategic
instead of tactical (and many of you probably feel the same way) but I
still feel compelled to send email. I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I feel like I would stop doing something if it wasn't effective. So I got to wondering just how effective it was, and more specifically what my most successful campaign was during the past few months. Who was the audience, how many people did it go to, and what was the goal?
It was a targeted mailing, going specifically to marketing people in my database with the words channel, indirect or affiliate in their title. It was a short, "personal" note from the lead owner promoting the business contact side of our business which mentioned how we work with companies that sell through channels by establishing special rates and marketing list building programs for their partners, and asking for 10 minutes of their time to provide more details. It went to just over 2000 people (which is small potatoes in the email marketing world) but the response was outstanding.
After a bit of thinking, here's what I told Seamus:
Email effectiveness is definitely on the decline, at least unless email marketers learn to adapt much the same way that search marketers have. Just as the most popular search terms are hypercompetitive, expensive and often demonstrate very limited return, mass batches of generic emails just don’t cut it anymore. We need to apply the “long tail” philosophy of search to email if we want to stay alive, and serve small, specific batches of people with the targeted messages we know that they are interested in.
If you are wondering what the "long tail" is, I wrote about it a while back. In a nutshell, approximately 90% of the traffic on search engines is tied up into a small number, maybe 10% of the keywords. The other 10% of the traffic (which is still a lot of traffic) is tied up in the more specific, niche, specialized phrases and words that make up the long tail.
For example, "marketing executives" is not in the long tail, but "director level or higher marketing contacts with indirect, channel or affiliate in their title from companies with at least $100M in revenue" is.
That email went out in January but sales is still talking about it, and I just
finished building a special landing page for one of the largest software
companies in the world to point their channel partners to when they
want to purchase business contacts or build targeted marketing lists. Targeted lists, with no minimum purchase requirements so that their partners can be very specific regarding their needs.
It's more work to craft hypertargeted messages to highly specific audiences. But the returns (and your reputation) will be well served by going after the "long tail" … of email.
Jason, you bring up an interesting point. Trust me, I am a little jealous that I missed email’s hay day but I too am not convinced that that hay day is actually over.
I think you said it right with your approach to email; send relevant content that addresses the clients business issues. Demandbase actually does it better then most, because you describe the business value to the client and how you are uniquely able to solve those issues.
Nice job on introducing an important topic to the email effectiveness question.
Its an interesting post about long tail keywords and email.I read somewhere that long tail keyword is more powerful that other short keywords.You have described very well it with example.
Do you still open all those emailed newsletters ?
Most of them are about accomplishments of the company, what is less interesting.
When you need something you search on the Internet (Google, Bing) and hope to find it on demand. You are not going to look for a long forgotten newsletter.
When landing on the website found by search the website should deliver the information almost instantly – else you are gone.
Hence the need for relevant content on your website.
I think you said it right with your approach to email; send relevant content that addresses the clients business issues. Demandbase actually does it better then most, because you describe the business value to the client and how you are uniquely able to solve those issues.
Do you still open all those emailed newsletters ?
Most of them are about accomplishments of the company, what is less interesting.
When you need something you search on the Internet (Google, Bing) and hope to find it on demand. You are not going to look for a long forgotten newsletter.
When landing on the website found by search the website should deliver the information almost instantly – else you are gone.
These all are really very interesting to know about it. Demandbase actually does it better then most, because you describe the business value to the client.