Is email marketing dead?

As social media takes the world by storm, debate has erupted in the channel as to whether the trend will kill off traditional marketing methods. Hannah Breeze finds out more

Scrolling through an inbox and swiftly hitting the delete option is a regular occurrence for many – consumers and businesspeople alike – as companies send out email after email in a bid to get their message across.

Save for a few important messages which escape the dreaded red button, many emails end up in the trash can. And that is why, according to Microsoft, a new approach to B2B marketing is needed.

In short, it said, email marketing is dying out.

In a post on the Official Microsoft Blog, Australian partner marketing manager Rob Evans said traditional techniques such as email are no longer fit for purpose. “We are seeing declining cut-through for many of the marketing techniques that we have used to effect over the years,” he said.

“For example, getting the right number of the right people to attend events gets progressively harder and many partners report that they don’t get a return for the often monumental effort that goes into planning and running an event or roadshow.

“Email marketing is also going the way of other forms of direct marketing, with 95 per cent of website visitors leaving without providing an address and 80 per cent of marketing emails now going unopened. In short, the marketing we have known is no longer working.”

Practise what you preach

Vendors, disties and resellers alike have been talking up the importance of social media and big data for years, with many placing them front and centre of their technology product strategy along with cloud and mobile.

But it seems the channel has to put its money where its mouth is in order to reach its customers. Microsoft’s Evans said that as the firm moves away from email, it will look to digital and social to promote its own products and events in the future.

According to Forrester, spending on social media marketing in the US alone will reach $16.2bn (£10.9bn) by 2019, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 17.4 per cent since 2014. And it is this trend which has prompted Newcastle reseller ForFusion to ditch its former email marketing strategy completely in favour of one based on social media and analytics.

ForFusion’s marketing leader Sean Ball said: “It’s no real surprise that old-hat marketing techniques don’t work anymore – the ways people interact with organisations both professionally and personally has changed massively. We’ve found that email doesn’t work for us.”

Instead, he said, his company has invested in sophisticated analytics tools which allow the firm to specifically target potential leads.

“If a company has a static IP address, we can know if someone from that company has been on our website, all their contact information, when it was founded, which pages they went on, how long they were on pages – for us it has been an extremely powerful tool.”

Tech Data’s marketing director Andy Dow said the debate is not a simple case of one or the other, and that both email marketing and social media promotion have their pros and cons.

“Flat email marketing, I think, is an annoyance to many who receive it,” he said. “Therefore, if you are going to do email marketing it has to be extremely targeted, you have to understand your audience very well, and ideally it should be tailored to the individual recipients – that is how we do ours. If you don’t have tailored content, you have missed the point.”

Social, on the other hand, has its drawbacks too, he added. “[Social media marketing] does have a place but we [the industry] have not worked out how to do it and how to measure its success,” he said. “It doesn’t matter how you market [content], if your message is not relevant, you are wasting everyone’s time.”