Mar 11 2009
Rumors of Our Demise Are Greatly Exaggerated
Every day it seems that another once well-respected sector of the business world finds itself under fire from the economic downturn. For whatever reason, many analysts seem eager to add email marketing to the list of soon-to-be casualties of the recession. Tweets, texts, and pokes – oh my! (or is it OMG?!)
My advice to the pundits: don’t call the coroner. Even better, you can un-friend him on Facebook because he won’t be visiting us anytime soon.
Now, I realize that I have covered this topic on our site before, but there have been some over-reaching statements made recently regarding the viability of the email industry that require a response. Let’s have a look at what’s being said about email right now and think about what’s really going on.
From ReadWriteWeb, responding to a Nielsen report showing that more adults are now on Facebook:
Our take away from these findings? People prefer the clean, controlled, multimedia and publicly social experience of social networking communication over the relatively open, individualistic and spammy medium of email. The fact that there is effectively no data portability allowing communication archives to be ported from one social network to another as there is with email doesn’t appear to be bothering people in the short term.
While the Nielsen numbers do confirm that adults have definitely warmed to social networks, they do not indicate what people “prefer” or how they interact with them. To suggest that MySpace became popular because it provides a “clean” experience is patently absurd to anyone with two functioning eyeballs. To suggest that the 15 Zombie/Vampire War requests I have in my Facebook account or the now-famous “work from home” Facebook ad scams are not “spammy” is equally ridiculous. For the record, I would also point out that there’s a difference between being private and “individualistic” – I would consider my email account private, while my tally of Twitter followers skews more towards the realm of “individualistic” and ego-serving.
As for the portability and privacy issues, I wholeheartedly disagree there as well. As Ben Isaacson pointed out here last week, people were quick to jump on Facebook’s change in terms of service. The bottom line was that people realized that their personal privacy and content ownership was at stake, and they mobilized quickly to undo these changes. Had they not undone their policy changes, there would have been an exodus of users to some extent – exactly how much, we’ll never know – accompanied by an outpouring of disdain among former Facebook users whose content was irretrievable.
These quibbles aside, the data does not suggest that people are jumping ship from email altogether. Again, email and social networks do not present an either/or proposition – ultimately it’s up to the user to decide if a particular message or topic of interest is worth sharing with the rest of the world or better kept private.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, Diana Dilworth from DMNews states that “E-mail shines in recession”:
Even though the channel has been around for some time and is not a hot new channel the way that social media and mobile are, it is really blossoming these days. And why not? It is a really efficient way brands to connect directly to consumers on a one-to-one basis. Since bigger brands are getting more deeply into it, the industry seems to be blossoming with higher expectations and standards of execution.
I agree that email marketing is an appealing option during a recession because of how cost-effective and quantifiable it is, but it is certainly not immune to belt-tightening. When marketing spend decreases, that can affect the scope of some programs – unlinked multi-channel data streams can remain unlinked, and acquisition initiatives sometimes play a secondary role to maximizing existing customer value. I guess my point is that lethargy has always been a marketing pitfall, and now the recession gives some people a built-in excuse for maintaining the status quo, so to speak.
So which is it – dead in the water, or alive and kicking? Searching for the correct answer, copywriter Bob Bly simply asks “Is E-Mail Marketing Dead?”:
New media evangelists have long denigrated e-mail as “interruption marketing” and praised both search and social networking as non-intrusive alternatives…The younger generation (my teenagers) also seems to shy away from e-mail, preferring Facebook and texting as their primary means of online communication.
Do you agree that e-mail is not only a viable but an extremely profitable online marketing channel, and will be for many years to come? Or do you side with new media gurus who predict e-mail marketing is going the way of the dodo and the dinosaur?
Two comments on Bob’s post seemed to bring some clarity to the situation:
Tom Kulzer said:
Someone forgot to tell social networks that email is dead. They all rely on it to drive a significant amount of their traffic back to the site. Have you received a “what’s new” email notice fromLinkedIn, an email from Twitter about new replies, new Facbook friend emails, etc. Reports of email being dead are just trying to catch attention by being sensational.Jim Logan said:
Tom hit the nail on the head: 1) social networking sites recognize great benefit from email marketing 2) talk about “this” or “that” dying is hype to gain attention. Relevancy is the issue with marketing. There’s no such thing as an interruption from something you value.
At the end of the day, I tend to agree with Tom and Jim. When you value information, you’re always happy to receive it, regardless of whether it’s in the form of a friend’s status update or a weekly email newsletter…or even, heaven forbid, a good old fashioned postcard. This logic alone is enough reason to keep faith in the email channel. So long as we continue to bring the relevance, the response should be there for some time to come.
