Is British Business Being Let Down By Email Marketing?

Posted: October 20th, 2011 by Simon Deakin 2

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Email marketing has been with us for a few years now, and many companies use it effectively to maintain relationships with their clients, keeping them informed of new products, upgrades and offers. It can be cost-effective and relatively easy to manage the process whilst reducing the lead time to get the message out. But with the growth of email, many messages are being ignored or deleted as inboxes get fuller .

We receive a lot of requests from clients wanting to buy email addresses for acquisition campaigns because they see it as a cheap, quick fix to get sales leads. When questioning clients on their expectations, a popular answer is that they want to use it for a single campaign to send their message to 1000’s of decision-makers in the best way possible without spending a lot of money. Pushed further many will admit that their perception of email marketing is that it is the ‘new kid on the block’ and ‘everyone’s doing it’. ‘Fashionable’, some might say.

However, fashions tend to come and go. One minute everyone’s wearing the same must-have boots and the next the same boots are being resigned to the back of the wardrobe.

Let’s look at some of the problems with the email medium. As I have already said the volumes of messages being sent have increased rapidly over the last few years and it is becoming an over- used tool which could be rapidly approaching its zenith of effective use for prospecting.

Email data for a business to business acquisition campaign currently achieves an average 11% open rate and 3% click through rate*. Plus the volumes of available, legally compliant email addresses represent only a portion of the total market so many clients are missing out on their message being seen by a large chunk of their target audience. But some companies still insist that this is the way they want to go with their direct marketing. They don’t seem to be interested in the other 70%-80% of the market they are missing out on by not using direct mail and/or telemarketing.

This is why it’s so important, in order to avoid missed opportunities, that a mixture of platforms is used to get your message in front of your target audience.

*DMA research Feb 2011