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Email marketing not dead yet
If Forrester research is to be believe, email marketing is feeling better. In fact, it seems email marketing is more effective than ever.
Researchers at Forrester have found that attitudes to emails from brands are actually becoming more positive, despite the fact that most people tend to write them off as annoying “spam.”
Business Insider attributes much of this change to the ubiquitous smartphone. I do think changes in online behavior and how much easier it is to check mail contributes to people not minding as much of the “spam.” Why not check your mail and read that newest offer from your favorite daily deals when you’re stuck in line at the coffee shop or grocery store?
BI did give another reason for this change in consumer behavior.
It might also be because, over time, marketers have gotten their act together. The spam you’re receiving is probably more highly targeted and relevant than before, and you probably requested it from your favorite companies.
Some marketers are still pretty bad about email and their marketing strategy. But there are a lot of marketers who are finally getting their act together and investing in their marketing programs and working with their customers to send the right offers at the right time.
Good email marketing drives revenue.
“The spam you’re receiving is probably more highly targeted and relevant than before, and you probably requested it”
I find this jarring to read and provoking all sorts of angry typing (if you asked for it, it’s NOT SPAM!) until I realized that the definition of ‘spam’, at least in that article, is shifted from the technical “email that is both unsolicited and bulk” to the practical “email that users don’t want”.
And that’s fine, so long as both the ‘targeted and relevant’ and ‘requested’ bits are still there, the trap is where senders think that they don’t need permission because they’ve convinced themselves “of course the users want this mail”.
Fortunately, that problem generally solves itself much better than it used to, to the detriment of the sender.
@Huey: As you noted, something can be spam, even if you asked for it, because of a shift in the definition of spam. However, one must also make such allowances in ordinary language, even when there is no shift in meaning, for example, in the sentence, “The bus stopped to pick up three passengers.” Presumably, you do not object to this sentence. Yet how can the bus pick up any passengers at all, since passengers are, by definition already on the bus? Of course the answer is that “passengers” is really an abbreviation for “people intending to be passengers”. Even in Mathematics there some things that are done for convenience rather than for rigor, such as the use of “if” to mean “if, and only, if” in definitions.