Why marketers need email more than ever

It’s a new year, so the predictions for the next big thing in direct marketing have been floating around for the past few weeks, as is our industry’s tradition.

For years we’ve heard “this is the year of mobile” or “this is the year of social”, and sure enough, as marketing channels, they have grown steadily over the past few years. Nobody ever says “this is the year of email” and yet the industry continues to grow, and in our own research, and that of our counterparts, the US DMA, the ROI of email marketing is simply outstanding.

Email is the glue that binds your marketing comms
Email is often described as the workhorse, or the digital glue which binds marketing communications together, but all too often it seems commentators are happy to melt down that particular workhorse to promote some other glue… let’s face it folks, email isn’t dead, it’s here to stay and still generates massive returns for marketers when used in the right way. But of course I would say that…

Choosing the right marketing channels
With the plethora of channels at a marketer’s disposal these days, it’s understandable why proponents of one channel over another are keen to flag-wave whenever they can. We are all in the marketing industry after all… The deep-rooted secret they don’t want to tell you, beyond the fact that all of these channels can work more effectively together rather than in siloes, is that (shock horror) they might not work at all.

That’s something you as a marketer need to figure out for your own business, and based on what you know or can infer about your own audience through accurate measurement and testing. If it helps, use the following lines of thought to determine an optimal experience:

Is your marketing activity cost effective?

• Can you spell out exactly how much your activity costs and how much it returns?

• Do you have a robust measurement framework which can show you how much each campaign costs to run, and can accurately attribute revenue back to the campaign and channel in question?

• If not, what steps can you take to start measuring these details, and how can you continuously improve?

What is the context of your marketing activity?

• Think about how, when, where and WHY a customer will receive communications from you – are you covering all possible touch points with a customer or are you missing opportunities to create a better experience for them?

• Similarly, are you over-contacting people? Again, the key is how you are measuring that – then you can test different approaches…

Are you making the most of cross-channel opportunities?

• What channels are you using? One? Two? More? Or none?

• Are your customers present in those channels, or are you using them because that’s what everyone else is talking about?
• What primary and secondary research can you do to find this out?

• What are your customers actually telling you about their channel preferences, or how can you find that information out?

Once you have some answers, or are at least working towards an answer in each of these areas, you are contributing towards a truly optimal experience – not just for your own customers, but for you as a marketer (the likelihood is that you employ vendors, agencies or suppliers of some degree to help facilitate your campaigns).

Think about it – by planning and executing your activity with these elements in mind, your customers get the marketing communications they want in the right format, via the right channel, and at the right time – the basic tenet of all successful marketing. Not only that, you as the genius marketer directing this activity get to prove how awesome you are.

Truly a win-win situation.

Jolyon Hunter, Marketing Consultant, ExactTarget
DMA Email Benchmarking Hub, and Email Marketing Council Member
Twitter: @jolyonh