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32 
Is Email Marketing Dead?
Email marketing has been around since the early days of the Internet (for business purposes.)
Internet marketers use email marketing campaign to promote their own and/or affiliated products to prospects.
The power of email marketing is in the size of the mailing lists. The more mailing lists members, generally means the more sales the Internet marketers make.
Internet marketers build up mailing lists through various methods, including ‘borrowing’ mailing lists – either the spam-free opt-in lists or the spam-invested non-opt-in ones – from email marketing companies.
But then, with the larger number of email spams out there and the more wise and tech-savvy email users today, email marketing is heading into extinction. Or is it?
Email marketing campaign vs. email spams
People love to email spam for one obvious reason – hopefully, their spam emails are getting the attention of the email recipients, and get them converted into ‘buying’ what the spammers offer – most of the cases, ‘products’ that main purposes are for identity theft and digital robbery.
With the countless email spams out there, the legitimate and real emails from Internet marketers are often accidentally regarded as spams.
This in itself loses thousands, if not millions of dollars of the Internet marketers’ money.
Email marketing campaign vs. tech-savvy email users
Tech-savvy email users regard email marketing campaign as a mixed-blessing – in one hand, the products Internet marketers offer can be very useful for them, while in other hand, they simply just want to get the free offers that often offered by Internet marketers to build up the mailing lists.
Free offers?
Yes – it is common that Internet marketers offer something free to get prospects to sign up to claim the freebies. Free offers come in the form of free services, free products, or free reports.
What tech-savvy users do is this: they set up a free email account from Yahoo!, Gmail or others for the purpose of getting the free offers. This means, they won’t read any incoming emails from the Internet marketers, which also means zero conversion – very smart, eh? :)
Despite all that – is email marketing dead?
In my opinion, not quite.
Like I mentioned above, there are prospects who opt-in to receive offers through their email accounts.
The prospects can be product and/or service users, or Internet marketers themselves that hope to make money online through affiliation. They want to receive offer, thus increasing conversion.
One problem, though – opt-in email lists are hard to built, simply due to the nature of the lists – members are voluntarily choose to include themselves into the list.
One of the solution to overcome the problem is through partnering with an email marketing company that offer you opt-in mailing lists.
Remember, the keyword here is ‘opt-in’ – there are literally thousands email marketing companies that spam their mailing lists. You should stay away from them, as using their service will damage your products or services reputation.
One of the opt-in email marketing company I know is iContact – starting from $9.95 per month, you can benefit from their email marketing services, including email templates, autoresponder, surveying, etc. And, oh, they have 15,000 customers and 100,000 users.
If you are interested in using email marketing services, I suggest you to read this email marketing white paper provided by iContact.
As long as Internet marketers can offer quality products and/or services, the email marketing is pretty much far from being extinct.
Ivan Widjaya
Email marketer
Image by Seattle Municipal Archives.
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I agree email marketing is still alive as long as you don’t spam your list and your email list are filled with opt in email users who want to get your emails. If they trust you it can be very effective
Hi,
Yes, the keyword, as I mentioned in the blog post, is opt-in – this is what better email marketing companies excel :)
no way. email is far from dead….dont let twitter like applications fool you. They inbox may change but email like postal mail will not die for quite some time…still growth in usage ahead.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. As blogging becomes more and more mainstream, the best blogs will begin to rise to the top and the millions of substandard blogs with low value and plagiarized content will be shown to the wayside. For these blogs, even a strong opt in list won’t be good enough. As for the rest of us, there will soon be “the next big thing” that will take the place of an old fashioned email list so let’s get ready to pioneer it when it does!
@ dave – indeed, even Twitter’s marketer use DM – and the DM is forwarded to your email inbox! It’s just the same thing, basically…
@ T – Thanks for your always-valuable opinion… When the time comes, people will follow the next big thing (I bet you and I will follow this next big thing!)
However, in the mean time, as the Internet learning curve for each of us is widely varies, email will stay as a marketing tool for, like, decades to come. Why? Because, even today, there are people who still don’t know how to use email and browse the Web (let alone understand what a blog is). My 2 cents ;)
Email marketing is actually growing and studies show that customers optin willingly to companies they trust and like. It is a highly cost effective means of marketing.
Email marketing has been around for years, so I was very surprised to see that you still think of the value in terms of the list size. Those that have been actually using email marketing responsibly have grown to understand that the size of the list has nothing to do with results. In fact, having a big list just to have a big list can hurt you more than help you because of the number of bounces, etc. Having a smaller, but high quality list can be cheaper to manage and can give you better results.
Responsible marketers are using advanced tools to segment their audience so that, ideally, the reader is only getting information relevant to their interests. And we’re talking only opt-in lists, which I define as someone specifically opting to receive information from your specific company – not a purchased list of opt-in names. Big difference. By sending targeted messages and not “spraying and praying,” marketers do see repeat sales, because they are using email marketing to retain customers – not acquire them. It’s about knowing your audience – not volume.
Constant Contact is one of the cheaper solutions for getting started, but hopefully most people think of email marketing as a little more strategic than “blasting.” There are plenty of other options out there that may be a better fit because they let you manipulate your data, build complex segments, etc.
I’m not that familiar with this blog, but if your audience is mostly inexperienced marketers, let’s get them started on the right foot. It’s so easy to put a sign-up form on your website for either a newsletter or something of value, and then at least you’re collecting information on people that have actually been to your site and opted-in to *your business.* I wouldn’t recommend buying lists. Take the time to build your own. Don’t risk your brand image by sending messages to people who aren’t expecting it. Then it will definitely be seen as spam.
@ EmailMarketingPro – Indeed :) Conversion will be high and c ustomers are actually been helped, rather than annoyed…
@ One L Agency – Wow, thanks for the explanation! First of all, thanks for your correction on the size of the email lists – since many of my readers and I are noobs on email marketing, your clarification is very useful.
Hi, i just want to say email marketing is one of my main source of traffic, and it is proven working.
I find as much of a call for email marketing as ever. Especially in hard times… free is a good price.
I think that people got email promotions confused with spam, which carries such negative connotations.
If the email is laid out nicely, and offers me something tangible, I am usually interested in pursuing.
@ simon – Nice testimonial to say :)
@ Greg Bowen – Yes, agreed. I found too much too-salesy emails that get me reading the first line and delete the emails right away, no matter whether they were spams or not…
Noob,
EMail marketing works for me. For one thing the response rate is much better. If you get a 4% response rate in print it is considered a success. I notice between 25 and 30% open rate with html eMail.
Opt-in is key and there fore so is the “list”. From everything I read, the key to that envious 6 figure web income (web guru’s harp on about) is 5,000 opt-in emails. Regardless, it all boils down to the classic case in sales – the numbers. If you have 5,000 people who accept your email, then only a modest percentage have to respond to earn you a respectable income.
Hi Ed,
How are you?
Yes, I do think size does matter in email marketing (despite the good explanation made by One L Agency above). Indeed, 5,000 opt-in emails are the number we should pursue.
What’s your view on ‘renting’ an email marketing company opt-in email lists?
Doing well, thanks Noob.
I don’t like the idea of purchasing an opt-in list as I think it defeats the purpose and value of opt-in. Opt-in to me are people who willingly accept your email. They are familiar with you. They are your audience so to speak. A purchased list doesn’t have the same buy-in.
I agree with with One L with regard to quality over quantity. But he/she might agree that a large list of 5,000 ‘true’ opt-in emails would be an enormous benefit to sales in products and services. I look to authors I admire like Jeffrey Gitomer, who has an enormous following.
I would bet he would rather give up a limb than his list.
Ed,
Good point :)
“I would bet he would rather give up a limb than his list” – LOL – a nice way to explain :D
does anyone have a list of legitimate optin company’s that do work?
I’ve got a few that I tried, like blast4traffic, and two other ones, but I have found that I didn’t get a single click on my site. I figure it went into spam folders, or it didn’t get out at all, if anyone has any legit sites they use that work, please let me know thanks Doug!
Hi Big D,
I’ve also tried some, like Majon’s Email Marketing and iContact, and it worked somehow, with various result and effectiveness.
I’m not an expert in this, but I guess the quality, not the quantity of the list determine your success.
The problem with renting an email marketing list is that you’ll never know where your email blast will end up eventually. Some do register just for the sake of the ability to send their emails to the list – they register with free email address created especially for this purpose – so yes, they won’t read yours, in this case.
The best thing is to visit Internet marketing forums to learn what other recommends, or even inquire the email marketing company directly.
My 2 cents.
Yeah i will visit some more of these, marketing is just not as easy as i thought.
Big D,
Yeah – probably the best thing is to build own list… And I guess this is quite difficult :) – Could services, such as Aweber.com help?
This is one really good blog I really would like to get more into Internet marketing But there is so much to them.
Anthony,
The first thing to do is to visit THE Internet marketers’ blogs. This way you can learn the basic of Internet marketing well. Some A-list bloggers, such as Jeremy Schoemaker (http://shoemoney.com/) and John Chow (http://johnchow.com/) can teach you what can be achieved through Internet marketing, and some A-list bloggers, such as Yaro Starak (http://Entrepreneurs-Journey.com/) and Darren Rowse (http://problogger.net/) can teach you to do Internet marketing with blogging.
Hey, I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I like what you have to say. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
I was looking for a detailed article on the use of email marketing, your article provides the inside out of the whole campaign. Interesting and informative post.
Hi Ivan
I agree with you on the fact that email marketing will still remain alive in spite of the spammers and the next big e-revolution, for the simple fact that it is more handy and time-tested to reach the target audience.
Best Regards
Lakshmi Muralikrishnan
Very much alive and will be for the very long foreseeable future. Opt-in is of course key.
Also key for any retention of existing customers.
Johan,
Indeed – it withstands the test of time and will continue to do so.
Cheers :)
Difficult topic. The fine line between spamming and keeping your “Present” customers up to date. It’s one thing to send emails to customers or bloggers that signed up to receive mail as opposed to sending mass mailings to everyone. I run a large web hosting, Joomla WordPress design and development firm. Plus run an online business. We send out thousands of emails per month to clients. I receive hundreds of emails per day, 90 percent of them are junk, spam. Don’t open them, don’t read them, actually set up Outlook to trash them. The point is, how effective can email campaigns really be? Most people I deal with all say the same thing, they delete before reading. Plus, a large amount of spam mail is full of scripts, that may be harmful. On a few occasions when I opened an email, went to the site, my computer was taken hold of, couldn’t back out, do anything. My Norton software kicks in and says “an attempt to blah? my computer was terminated. Its not worth the security risk. I my final opinion, email campaigns are mostly finished…Excellent site will bookmark and return often.
Chris,
Many thanks for sharing your opinion.
It seems that the key in email marketing today is the double-opt-in feat. The problem is, with so many junk mails coming into our inboxes, it’s often hard to tell which ones are solicited and which are not (and yes – I receive also dozens of junk email in a day.) “Good emails” are often marked as junk emails by the software, and sifting through the sea of junks is a time consuming task.
Many IM-er I know claim that email marketing still works, but I’m not sure if it’s still as effective as before…
As long as the emails are sent to users who have “opted in” to receiving them, email marketing is far from dead. In a hectic internet world, it can be hard to remember to check all of your favorite sites and blogs daily, having that sort of information waiting for you in your inbox is a great marketing tool.
Email marketing is not dead but it is very slow process. The chances of a succceful leads in email marketing is less than one percent. I guess if you have more target email database than the result will be much more than one percent.