Sorry folks, but it’s time to change your email marketing strategy (again). Many marketers and small business owners have been so focused on building their email marketing lists for the past several years, that they haven’t looked forward to see what’s barreling toward us all. It’s no secret that email marketing has become less effective in the past decade, but it’s about to take an even larger hit.
Email continues to become less trusted by consumers everywhere, thanks to spamming, ransomware, and Princes from Nigeria. Then, its usefulness as a marketing tool changed almost overnight, thanks to Covid. So many people lost their jobs, and a huge percentage of our email marketing lists included only subscribers’ work emails. Boom. Gone.
Here’s are three reasons to change how you build your email marketing list (starting yesterday!) to protect its usefulness:
1. Work emails are losing their reliability for your email marketing strategy.
With all the job-hopping that’s now the norm, their personal email is far more reliable. Even though we may think they don’t check it as frequently during the workday, look at your own habits: how often do you check your personal email throughout the day? Also, I check my email primarily on my phone these days, and it all comes into the same email inbox using Outlook, so it really makes no difference to me.
2. Text marketing is a clear winner over any email marketing strategy.
The justification is clear, when you consider that text messages have a 97% open rate within 15 minutes of sending (source). Most B2B marketers lag behind retail though in text marketing.
The writing is on the wall, though, that email is slowly dying, so we need to start using text marketing if we’re not already. This is a little more difficult. Make it optional on your website, because people are more protective today of their cell phones as their last bastion of spamlessness (yes, I just made that word up). But definitely start asking for it and tell them how you plan to use it. Some sites are offering a bonus for text sign-up on top of what they already offer for email signup, which is another incentive to get people to part with a bit more of their privacy.
3. AI is poised to change the game.
Content marketing was a thing long before email, but when email came along, it was a marketer’s dream. Soon, everyone was using Constant Contact and marveling at how easy it was to send out one message to thousands of people at a time, without postage stamps! Woohoo! Email marketing strategy was on fire!
We’re about to go through that type of marketing renaissance again. Artificial Intelligence is all the talk these days, and for good reason. When tools like ChatGBT and Canva can create 100 Instagram posts in a matter of seconds, and anyone can generate a blog in even less time than it takes to write out c-o-n-t-e-n-t c-r-e-a-t-i-o-n, we’re in for a huge change. Be ready for the biggest flood of content we’ve seen since Google was invented.
That means that weary prospects everywhere, already buried in information overload, are about to see that multiply exponentially. It’ll get harder and harder to reach your audience through email marketing.
The Bottom Line
As business owners or marketers, we need to constantly stay on top of what’s here, and what’s next. Start acting as if your email marketing strategy is going away in a year and start formulating a backup plan now. We all saw how vulnerable our lists were during Covid, and now we have to build back stronger and smarter.
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Here’s another blog that might interest you: Artificial Intelligence and Marketing
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