Email Marketing: Too Much of a Good Thing?

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Email hasn’t worn out its welcome – yet. It still holds the title of most effective (and most used) digital channel, according to CMI research.

But how long will the good times roll? Even as we send messages to our growing (we hope) email databases as marketers, we’re also email consumers. We know how full our email inboxes have become.

Godfrey’s Michael Barber

With so much competition inside (and outside) the inbox, are email marketing’s days numbered? At ContentTECH Summit, Godfrey’s senior vice president and chief creative officer Michael Barber presented a session about the convergence of content and email. Afterwards, I talked to Barber about email’s enduring popularity – and whether an end is in sight.

Why is email still such a go-to for marketers and consumers?

MB: I think the answer comes down to familiarity. If you look at what’s dominating the conversation right now with social media and apps, there’s a level of unfamiliarity there with the older demographics. They’ve been on email for 26 or 27 years.

We’re starting to see an impact of privacy on whether people are spending time in social media or not. People believe there is an element of control and privacy that they have in the inbox that they may not have on social media.

Are marketers making mistakes that threaten to ruin the channel for everyone?

Where do we start? I think the biggest challenges that marketers face is delivering experiences that are timely, targeted, and relevant for their subscribers.

Too often, marketers deliver one blanket message to their entire subscription base. They don’t realize that every time they deliver something annoying or not seen as personalized or not seen as directly targeted to that subscriber, then the subscribers start to ignore their future messages. If they feel their time is being wasted, they’re not going to go back to that brand consistently.

Every time we deliver a message to the inbox – whether it’s transactional, promotional, or a newsletter – and we’re not as timely, targeted, and relevant as possible, we’re slowly erasing the relationship [we’ve built]. That can create a challenge to repair later on.

We’ve all been doing this for so long. Is there anything even experienced email marketers might be surprised to learn about email?

I don’t think this will come as a surprise, but there’s no perfect time to send an email campaign anymore. For years that was the question we all tackled: What’s the optimal time to deliver it so someone will open it?

People are reading and interacting with email at all different times of day in really strange places. They’re having second-screen viewing experiences, they’re going to the toilet, they’re doing any number of things in their daily lives, multitasking around the inbox.

To get people’s attention, we have to make sure we’re doing the best we can from a from-name…