Too early to call time on email marketing

Despite the recent comments of a Microsoft exec on the topic, it would be short-sighted to abandon email in favour of an all-social campaign, Fordway's Jon Beck argues

Earlier this year Microsoft ignited a debate by saying that email is no longer effective and a new approach is needed to B2B marketing. According to Australian partner marketing manager Rob Evans: "Email marketing is 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." He said the company will look to digital and social media to promote its products and events in future.

Although I agree that social media has an important role to play in channel marketing, he's in danger of throwing away a tried and tested tool in his enthusiasm for something new.

Social media is a useful means of reaching out to your target audience to increase engagement with you and your business, and by treating it as an additional, complementary channel you can increase your marketing success.

However, the first question marketers should ask is which channel/s are their audience using? A recent customer satisfaction survey by Fordway indicated that while social media use is growing among our customer base, it is still a minority who use it, and an even smaller percentage who use it for business. What we know is that all our customers currently use email, so we and other channel companies would be short-sighted to abandon email in favour of an all-social campaign.

The 2015 State of Marketing survey by Salesforce found that 73 per cent of marketers believe email marketing is core to their business. The survey also looked at how those emails are being read, with 70 per cent of respondents saying mobile marketing is a critical enabler of products and services. This research simply confirmed what most of us know empirically – that more and more people open emails on their mobile devices. This means ensuring your communications are designed to work in this environment, including both the email itself and any links or landing pages.

Email marketing is a catch-all term for any campaign that communicates a message with a clearly defined call to action: an event invitation, a link to a landing page, an opinion piece linking to product information or a case study, a white paper etc. If we want to improve its effectiveness, we need to focus our efforts much more tightly.

For instance, by applying STP (segmentation, targeting, positioning) analysis across your customers and prospects and delivering campaigns accordingly, you can achieve significantly improved results. It means a lot more work at the planning stage, and perhaps investing in new analysis tools and training, but the results are worth the investment.

It is also vital to look at content from your audience's point of view. Forget about what you want to say and think about what will actually interest your customers. Working closely with your sales team and your technical colleagues who interact with customers on a daily basis will help you develop greater insights into what is really important and avoid wasting budget on ineffective campaigns that are easy targets for the Delete button.

So while I agree with Microsoft on many things, I have to disagree about email marketing. So long as marketers are prepared to work hard to target the right people, ensure their emails are suitable for a mobile readership, tailor their messages appropriately and link to interesting, relevant content, email will remain an effective marketing tool in the IT channel.

Jon Beck is marketing and alliance manager at Fordway