Rumors have been rife for some time that email marketing is dead, especially spread by the younger generation of entrepreneurs who spend around 3/4th of the day on social networking sites. Initially, the rumor started when Apple announced ‘iDontNeedEmailAnymore’ program.
Due to high social networking integration in 2011, email marketing has stopped being the preferred mode of marketing but it is not completely out of vogue yet.
Despite what people claim, emails continue to be the most effective marketing tool for business promotion.
Interesting Facts and Figures –
- A recent Benchmarking Report on 2012 email marketing has entrusted that around 67% of commercial firms are planning to enhance their email marketing budget this year.
- As stated in ForeSee Results Report on Social Media Marketing, 64 % of internet users prefer email as the best source to get in touch with promotional information. This is really a big campaign rate as compared to social media campaigns programs.
- According to CAN SPAM Act (2003), businesses can purchase a list of selected leads and email them for marketing purposes. Today, we call the process email SPAM because it is illegal to email people without their permission. In 2012, marketing experts estimate that businesses and blogs will generate a permission forum and mail them to their leads to start sending promotional emails to them.
How to Mobilize Email Marketing?
Most bloggers, small business owners and entrepreneurs has to use email marketing someday because it helps to capture leads and promote products and/or services to prospective readers cum buyers. Here are some ideas / strategies to help you with email marketing:
- Form Auto Response:
This is the ultimate and most promising email marketing approach where you can send an auto-response form via email if someone is interested in your products and services. This auto response form can be a call-to-action process or can be a contact requesting form.
In short, it is not the standard “thank you” response to your website visitors; it goes a step further and requests a user to divulge contact information for further communication of your products and services.
- Lead Nurturing Campaign:
The next one is the lead nurturing campaign process in which collective emails are scheduled at various instances to engage targeted people continuously. Every email in this process is scheduled to enhance user engagement. Also, the links encrypted with lead nurturing process can be easily measured, monitored and adjusted in case of low response rate.
- Email Signatures
This is an inbound email marketing strategy adopted by everyone. Email Signatures are encrypted with various links and marketers use this process to target people directly towards the business website or other webpage.
Barriers to Successful Email Marketing –
The biggest challenge for most email marketers is inadequate staffing. This barrier results in the lack of productive email marketing strategies. Also, emails can remain as the lead generating sources only if the inbox is not overcrowded. In such cases, delivering only relevant messages is the only optimized way to generate lead from emails.
If you think your email marketing is still alive, it is the best time for initiate changes in your email marketing practices.
Future of Email Marketing –
Email marketing continues to remain a private mode of following up with interested prospects. It is the ultimate and an inexpensive alternative to product marketing. In 2012, email auto-response strategy will be undertaken by the ‘follow-up’ approach as it is considered to be a fairer practice.
In fact, email marketing is no more confined as a singular practice. The merger of social media and email marketing is becoming a fact. Today’s generation is highly adoptive to social media networking. Keeping this consideration in mind, Facebook has started crossover emails to develop an integrated messaging platform. Facebook users will now be able to receive email with their social connections.
Mobile email accessing will increase in 2012 as well. As people are adopting Smartphones globally and high speed internet based cell phones, it will become easy to approach targeted markets via wireless email accessing services.
In email marketing, QR codes are present too but people are not adopting it quite well. The likely problem is the unawareness of people about QR scanning concept. Nevertheless, marketers are hopeful that 2012 will bring a QR based email marketing technology to cover maximum email leads.
Summing Up
Several industry experts suggest that email marketing will come back with a bang, with better technology and innovative power. The use of Flash and HTML emails is becoming popular too. This is certainly a new generation where email cannot remain inaccessible even when the user has slow internet connectivity and marketers have their sights set to optimally use this opportunity.
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About Chitraparna Sinha
Lot’s of people have abandoned traditional blogs and opted to use email instead. I choose to use both but I actually prefer blogging over email marketing. I resisted doing it for a very long time and it is taking me a long time to get used to doing it effectively (5 months so far, can’t believe it’s the month of May already – time flies). Thanks for the information Chitra, nice to see you on Amit’s blog.
Hey Ileane, nice to see you here. I also use both the methods in one of my blogs which no one knows about (*chuckles*) and its giving me good results. I don’t think blogging should be abandoned in favor of email marketing at all.
Email marketing is not dead. Just rumours. Both have to be done properly. Blogging is the way to get known and use that method to get the emails. So both has to be combined together to get the results you require for marketing.
Shalu, how much ROI can one expect with email marketing? Just curious to know.
Hi Chitra, email marketing is new to me but if you see my website YouBihar, I occasionally send emails to my members over 10,000 of them and many would respond. But here, I am speaking this in terms of someone who receives emails from professional bloggers. I do tend to buy things from emails if I like the product and trust the sender. But I think email marketing is not dead at all. Its still alive and kicking.
YouBihar is really good. In India, you are the second female blogger/solopreneur I have come across. Anyways, coming back to the point, I believe if a subscriber trusts a blog owner, the subscriber is likely to purchase through the product promotional mails.
Nevertheless, subscribers should not be spammed. Sending such mails once a week is fine. If you take your blog subscriber number and there is 1% conversion ratio, and you earn $5 per sale, $500 in one shot is not bad at all…not bad at all… 🙂
Indeed indeed Chitra. YouBihar was created out of passion and I never had any intention of making money out of it. The issue is what do you sell, what do you promote on it. The Indian market is still primitive. Unlike in the western world, buying online is easy but not in India. However, things are changing at a rapid rate. A lot faster then expected.
Anyhow, I have realised the potential of blogging and affiliate marketing is huge. Some top email marketers can make thousands from 1 email alone. Trustworthiness is vital for email marketing, there are a few bloggers who buy the product, test it and then email them to their subscribers. You know what I mean.
Thanks for the complement and best wishes.
Email marketing in 2012 is taking new roots with new strategies, these days many companies are using HTML version on email newsletters. Also I suggest you to post some useful email templates too. Thanks chitra for this information.
Thanks Bharat. Will follow up this post with useful email templates 🙂
Great tips Chitra, thanks for sharing. Although, I have never tried email marketing, but now I should really give it a shot 🙂 !
Do give it a try. It works if you get the concept right 🙂
Email Marketing is still going on very strong. But unless you sell a service or have a ton of content people wish to get updated on – it is rough starting out.
But there are two great services to help you out! MailChimp and aWeber!
Jason, isn’t setting up MailChimp complex?
nice tips chitra, i used Email Marketing for my clients site for targeted traffic but that time not getting much result so i boost seo for that site and take some traffic.
I think it totally depends on the type of business you have. Most of the companies rely heavily on email marketing while some of them prefer blog to promote their business.