Is email marketing dead?

Is it difficult to ‘do’ email marketing? No.

Is it difficult to ‘do email marketing well’? No, but you need to put the fundamentals in place and stick with them.

Don’t set and forget

There are myriad email service providers like Mailchimp, Active Campaign, Campaign Monitor and Send Grid that are intuitive and can have you on your way to sending your first email campaign within an hour.

So often we see a set and forget, spray and pray, un-targeted email marketing approach that achieves little and is likely doing more damage for your brand than it is achieving your goals.

And this is really where the conversation about email marketing for your business should start.

If we had a dollar for every time we heard terms “let’s send an email blast”, “we need an EDM”, “let’s just get it out to people’s inboxes”… well you know where we are going with this.

There are questions you ought to be asking before sending an email.

Questions to ask before sending an email campaign

• Who are we sending the email campaign to?
• Does the content of the email help the recipient solve a problem or does it add value?
• Have you included a clear call-to-action?
• Does the call-to-action lead to a low friction environment (like a landing page) for the target audience to take action (like filling out a contact form, RSVPing for an event or downloading a white paper)?
• How are you measuring success? If you have an audience of 2,000 people, but only 50 people are opening your emails, and only 10 are clicking any of your links, is the effort of writing copy, developing assets and building a campaign justified by the return? It’s also important to consider Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection feature.
• How are you tracking and attributing traffic to your owned channels? The goal of email marketing is generally to send qualified traffic to your website. Are you using UTMs to get a clear understanding of how much traffic each campaign is delivering to specific pages? Do you have goal tracking set up in your analytics to quantify your success, e.g a visitor from an email campaign completing a contact form, downloading a white paper or engaging with a chat bot?

Consider Apple’s new Mail Privacy Protection feature

One of the many privacy updates announced by Apple at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference was a new feature called Mail Privacy Protection, which restricts email services and senders from collecting information about its users.  

Katie Skinner, User Privacy Software Manager, Apple.

This new Mail Privacy Protection prompts users to select whether they want to ‘protect mail activity’ or not. If they choose the ‘protect mail activity’ option, Apple Mail will hide their IP and load remote content privately.  

With a staggering 96% of Apple users opting not to be tracked after the recent privacy feature, App Tracking Transparency, was introduced, it’s safe to assume that most users will choose to hide their activity from third parties on the new Mail Privacy Protection feature too.  

And while more privacy is always good news, the Mail Privacy Protection will cause some headaches for marketers. 

Communicators will need to look beyond open rates to measure the success of an email campaign and start focusing on other metrics, such as delivery rates and click-through rates, as well as ensuring email lists are up to date. 

Adapt and make changes

As witnessed with many other digital channels, email use has evolved and changed. With social media platforms increasingly becoming pay to play, email is just one aspect of a digital marketing ecosystem.

We can help

Cannings Purple develops beautifully designed email templates to suit your marketing and messaging objectives. Templates are built on a responsive platform to enable perfect appearance and presentation on desktop, smartphone or tablet device. If you need help with your email marketing or would like to implement email marketing automation to accelerate your audience engagement and better segment your customers, Contact Senior Digital Consultant, Cameron Wong.

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