December 21, 2012
E-mail Marketing Is the Old Dog Learning New Tricks
As hot new trends go, social media marketing is looking decidedly lukewarm. Online shoppers pushed Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales to new heights this year, and yet according to a November report from IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark, the number of those e-shoppers making purchases after clicking through from social networks dropped by at least 26 percent vs. 2011.
If not social, what stimulated all the incremental November online sales? It’s likely much of it was triggered or facilitated by good ol’ fashion e-mail. Bloomberg reports that retailers are expected to blast out 19 percent more e-mail messages this year. Undoubtedly that figure conjures images of your choked inbox, but it seems retailers have the right idea. Evidence demonstrates that e-mail as a marketing vehicle is significantly outperforming social media — three-to-one — based on sales per dollars invested, this according to the Direct Marketing Association.
Of course, e-mail has been around much longer than social media and so one might wonder if its dominance in the digital realm is due to years of refinement or if there are inherent problems with social that render it less useful to marketers.
A recent Bloomberg piece describes how many retailers are now using advanced personalization techniques that tailor and target e-mail based on recipients’ online shopping habits. For example, when a consumer abandons items in an online shopping cart, the retailer has an excellent indication of the shopper’s unfulfilled desires for a follow-up e-mail. Conversely, retailers can take note of what links in an e-mail a shopper clicks and use that data to trigger banner ads that may follow her/him from website to website.
While e-mail appears to be the rare old dog able to learn new tricks, by the curl of its tail, social appears to be an altogether different animal.
In a recent keynote at the MediaPost E-mail Insider Summit, Evan Shumeyko, global director of CRM for OgilvyOne, said that one of e-mail’s advantages over social lies in the greater willingness of users to share personal information. While proponents of social extol the "sharing" ingrained in its culture, clearly that tendency doesn’t extend comfortably to online marketers as readily as for e-mail communication.
It seems logical that Facebook users, for example, are there to keep up with what friends are doing and find the efforts of marketers to be intrusive. But thinking back to the first half decade when e-mail usage was adopted by the masses, it too was a more personal form of communication. Over the decades, as legit and spam-ish commercial messages invaded our inboxes, we either became more accepting or gave up trying to resist (however you interpret it). Does social need to go through the same maturation process, or is this young pup really an untrainable kitten?
Discussion Questions
What do you see as the greatest strengths of e-mail vs. other marketing media? What new e-mail personalization techniques get you excited? Will social require many years to mature in order to become a viable marketing platform?
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Why focus on one marketing tool? Email, social media, traditional media, all have a place in a marketing campaign. All touch consumers. All make impressions.
Marketers should create a plan to use tools that fall within their budgetary parameters. Then they need to tell the story of their brand, and if desired, offer an incentive for immediate action. This has been the case since advertising was created.
No one media is the end all and be all.
The greatest strengths marketing include personalization, frequency and cost. A weakness, by the way is how easy it is for the customer to push the delete button. Social media isn’t close to the maturity level of email. And email may actually be on the decline. Social media has opened up new channels.
My prediction is what’s hot today may not be so hot in a few years, as there will be other forms of communication that take over. And the maturity cycle will be much faster. Whatever you could do with email, you’ll be able to that and much more with social media.
Everything is a matter of chronology including all marketing media. So it would seem that social media’s greatest strength lies in its being in tune with today’s times.
None of the e-mail personalization techniques have gotten me real excited. The constant parade of new techniques are ubiquitous and the strengthens of each impacts on other techniques.
As to the future, social media constantly flies over us and so far it has left only its shadow.
All marketing media are viable as long as the marketer understands how/if the consumer is using them. With that said, it is not about maturity IMHO. Marketers must always be creative and stay on top of what their consumers respond to. Continue to evolve!
I have a much more negative, and ultimately pessimistic, view of email and social “push” techniques (email, social inbox, etc…). They act and spread like viruses by eventually spreading out of control, and killing the “host,” in this case the marketing vehicle’s own audience. Success leads almost immediately to overuse and to the eradication of any goodwill that might have existed in the early days.
You see, if you tell an audience of marketers that email or social targeting works, they will ALL do it. Customers get tired of it, the ROI shrinks and the focus of marketers moves on to something else only to have the pattern repeat itself. This cycle comes at a cost: every time you annoy a customer digitally, you create friction and a loss of goodwill that may not get measured but exists nonetheless.
You are not going to hear this from an email marketer with a vested interest in your social strategy (i.e. your spend). Use your judgement and your own experience to strike the right balance with your customers. Never forget that when you get a click-through rate of 1.5% (which marketers will call an amazing achievement), you have 98.5% of customers who received the email and did nothing. How many did you annoy? How many did your frustrate? What is the cost of the “friction” and loss of goodwill you have created?
Do not make too much of the often quoted 26% drop in sales due to social. The numbers driving this measurement are very small to drive significant decision making.
Social media is a legitimate marketing channel and is here to stay. As marketers, we need to be creative in how we apply the channel and how we blend it into our overall marketing mix and communication strategy. To create effective strategies we will need to know when it is effective; push or pull, short term vs. long term, etc. Knowing when and where it is effective will be preceded by proper analytics and measurement. Without a correct marketing attribution analysis, most of the social media sales will be incorrectly attributed to a different channel.
As we suggested in a recent blog, social is an important tool for retail marketers but driving product sales should not be its primary purpose. Social’s primary role should be building relationship and loyalty and the social conversations are most effective when they are centered around the entire shopping/store experience.
A Facebook page full of product shots and purchase links will rarely be very compelling or effective. So yes, retailers absolutely should continue to invest in social, but for driving transactions, email and targeted display advertising will remain the most effective digital techniques.
I would not be comfortable with using metrics like click-through as an accurate measure of success for any individual channel let alone comparing across different ones.
So, a seasonal “Bah, Humbug!” from me!
I would observe that email has been around for some time and I’d expect in relation to social…
(a) for email to have achieved greater gain in sophistication and performance over this time.
(b) for brands to have learned whether and how to use email effectively.
Email is easy, quick and inexpensive. Better yet, it has numbers that are easy to measure, and effectiveness that can yield something which marketers can better understand than the still nascent social media.
Perhaps the better question about social media may not be when it will mature, but rather will it ever be able to deliver the true measurable numbers which other media delivers.
Email’s effectiveness has to do with how email has become one of life’s routines and when a holiday comes along we have routine (opening email) meeting routine (solving/enjoying the holiday problem/opportunity.) Emailers are deep into knowing how to insert themselves in life’s routines, just like the Sunday circular people have become part of the weekly shopping ritual for some of their customers (and the Valpack people).
From what I know about FB advertising, FB allows the following experience: Show Media “1” to people with the following a. demographic, who b. “like” “X,Y,Z” and who c. belong to A,B,C groups/interests.)
FB has an amazing narrow-casting tool but with that goes the work around managing narrow-casting campaigns—seems like work to me as in defining the filters, managing the budget, fine tuning.
I think email is a bit more 1 to 1 since it’s usually based on actual behavior, e.g.: Send Person “A”, Campaign “1,” because based on their past ‘real’ behavior, since the probability of relevance and conversion is good enough to burden them with 1-second of attention. And if “A” has opted into specific alerts, even better!
Finally, What get’s me excited? I like the capabilities that software developer NYC-based Movable Ink enables, mainly: real time updates to email already in your inbox. It has some interesting use cases and demonstrates that email is not calcifying. It was also founded by a former colleague who will now owe me a cup of coffee!
Just an addendum, I missed something big when I noticed that someone forwarded a Walmart gift card offer that appeared in my Facebook Newsfeed—I guess it’s telling that I didn’t notice these in the past—perhaps that’s just me, but most definitely it related to your question—oops!
The greatest strength of email vs other media is the ability to segment the emails to speak to the individual customer’s needs at a very low cost. In social media, the volumes are low and the company has little information about that individual customer. In direct mail, the volumes may be high, but so is the cost. In addition, there is a lag between when the communication is sent and when the results come in.
The instantaneous nature of email permits companies to introduce the element of timing as well—where the customer receives the communication at the right time for the right products. That sense of timing, combined with the other factors, make email the critical tool for establishing and reinforcing relationships.