Does good old email marketing still work?

This article is the third part of a five part series outlining Momentum Academy’s In Focus: Marketing and Growth – Beyond Google and Facebook, which happened on 27 May. Here is the first part and second part.

To find more about the event, email us at [email protected] and you can watch the recording here.

How many marketing emails are sent everyday globally?

More than 40% of participants at Momentum Academy’s In Focus: marketing and growth strategies had the right answer – 300 billion!

It’s obviously a significant marketing channel, outside of China, that many have not paid attention to, despite the amount of emails sent (and the amount of customer attention/annoyance generated).

However, are companies doing it effectively? 

Some of the ‘popular’ tricks which actually didn’t work

1. Sending email blasts or email segmentation: 

• • • The more email blasts you send, the more likely your customers will get annoyed and unsubscribe.
    • Some businesses choose to segment their customers based on their profile and demographics, but many of these segmentations don’t work as planned.

2. Test out different platforms: What works for one customer might not work for another. Pick a platform that works best for your business model based on the pricing, interface, customer care, etc.

3. Time optimisation: Does it really matter when you send an email at 9:15 or 9:30? These subtle time differences don’t make a huge difference over time.

4. Content optimisation: This is useful but it shouldn’t be a priority, unless you get the basics right (see below).

A marketing tech firm, a long time friend of Momentum Academy, has been working on optimizing email marketing for years and here are a few pointers from them on how to engage your audience through email marketing:

1. Use a commercial graded Email Sending Platform (ESP), and have a dedicated team to manage your domain: Try to avoid sending the same spam email to customers repeatedly.

2. Ensure healthy growth of databases via real-time integration of data sources: Since we encounter customers through different channels, it is important to integrate all our channels, analyze the data points and engage with our customers.

3. Maintain a regular mailing schedule: Send marketing emails at a fixed time, and keep that consistent. 

4. Always target users based on their engagement level rather than their profiles: For example, if you want to send a promotion targeting female customers, you might naturally exclude all male recipients. That is often not true, because male customers might also would like to buy for their spouses, relatives and friends. The key for marketing effectiveness is segmenting by engagement level, not by demographics. 

5. Automation flow in place to get incremental revenue: This is self explanatory.

6. Content optimisation: Have the basics up and running before diving into content optimisation, otherwise you would not see results.