Email marketing - a play in 4 acts

Act 1: the rise of e-mail marketing
At Leonardo ENERGY, we started the use of e-mail marketing almost 3 years ago. Compared to the printed newsletters, ezines offer increased flexibility, detail campaign metrics and significantly cost reduction. And the results were encouraging - we had opening rates of 60-70% and click-through rates of 30-40%. And each campaign provided a major traffic boost for our developing website at the time. E-mail marketing works!

Act 2: a crowded arena
Today, a few 100 campaigns later, we observe significant fatique effects in e-mail marketing. Many organisations have discovered the advantages. Even many who have never done printed newsletters are now using e-zines. Subscribers react by adopting a habit of using secondary e-mail accounts at Yahoo or Gmail for receiving e-zines. And even for these, subscription rates are falling - it becomes harder to collect and retain permission-based mailing addresses. Not surprisingly, open and click-through rates are falling. For our website, with its increased background traffic, e-mail campaigns nowadays produce a bump rather than a boost in the number of visitors.

Act 3: Blogs enter
Meanwhile, blogs have become popular. Where the main choice a couple of years ago was ‘printed versus electronic newsletter’, today it is ‘electronic newsletter or blog’. Are blogs the next logical step in flexibility, enabling a more flexible, frequent and targeted interaction with users?

Act 4: a few considerations
In practice, above choices are not ‘or’ but ‘and’. The secret of success is in the right mix of marketing techniques, taking into account the comfort zone of users. A few considerations to take into account:

• Is your target audience familiar with blogs & blog readers? And if not, why not? Is this rationale legitimate, or can you change it?
• Is your website well established (i.e. has substantial regular visits), or is it in a stage of active promotion?
• Do you have a database of permission-based e-mail addresses?

If the answer to all 3 questions is ‘yes’, you have all flexibility. Organise your regular communications around one or more blogs, fully integrated into your successful corporate website. Consider e-mail marketing as a support option.

If the answer to all 3 questions is ‘no’, you’re probably in the early days of building a web presence. You probably want to focus initial efforts on developing content and a mailing list. At tactical points, web advertising can help.

The future role of e-mail marketing
Despite above fatigue effects, e-mail marketing remains an essential part of marketing communications. Meaningful campaigns could be:

• Sending flash alerts about new publications, new findings, … Despite the crisis in e-mail communications, users continue to appreciate receiving e-mail messages that are highly relevant to them. For this purpose, it helps to segment the user database in (highly targeted) topical interests
• Sending a daily - weekly - monthly digest. This brings e-mail marketing and blogging closer together
• Develop a first-class e-Magazine with information that cannot be found anywhere else, at least in the format in which it is presented