Follow Alex on 
Connect with Alex on 
Meet Alex on 
Syndicate
About Me
Alex - Alexandros Poulos is Covisio's Managing Director and co-founder. He enjoys technology marketing, innovative thinking, and living by the sea.
Alex is the main contributor of the On the Scene marketing blog.
Learn more about me here.
Email Marketing – Still Friend or Foe? (Part I)
Malcolm Gladwell in the afterword of “The Tipping Point” wrote that email communication is showing “symptoms of immunity” with its growing overuse by communicators and marketers. This should come as no surprise.
Email marketing is clearly a cost-effective way to reach target audiences and is already a mainstream channel for internet marketing especially in today’s economic climate that calls for restricted marketing budgets. But are the returns there? Do recipients respond effectively to marketing messages mass-delivered via email along with tens or hundreds or even thousands of other messages that flood their Inboxes on a daily basis? How often and under what circumstances do marketing leads convert via the reception of an email? That’s where things are hazy. Just look in your Inbox and see what messages are really important to read and respond to, what messages are just informative to browse through, what messages are rather indifferent and a waste of time to read, and what messages are merely spam (whether caught as such by the spam filters or not).
There is no shortage of reports, analyses, best practices, and case studies on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of email marketing. There is value in most of them, no question, but I just think it’s a matter of marketing strategy as well. So, I would like to share a strategic plan of success – in its simplified form – that we have used over and over with our clients (all in the technology sector) in a variety of email programs to target a multitude of different industries. It’s nothing outside what common sense and basic marketing principles dictate, but, in our experience, email marketing campaigns are carried out without proper strategic planning way too often. And if the plan is missing, in today’s landscape where professionals (including decision makers and influencers for marketing purposes) are actually turning more and more “immune” to email, these campaigns are the most likely ones to fail.
In my next blog posting I will go over 6 things you definitely need to have thought about before launching an email campaign.
One Response to “Email Marketing – Still Friend or Foe? (Part I)”
Alex says:
August 12th, 2009 at 12:12 am
Here’s a great post with a crystal clear case study about email campaign failure and a thoughtful attempt by the vendor to remedy it:
http://www.webinknow.com/2009/08/sleazy-opt-in-email-tactics-from-otherwise-reputable-organizations.html