All Aboard the Email Train

Recently I have been inundated with emails. They are from retailers that I have made purchases from in the past and present; sites that I signed up to and sites that I have no recollection of ever giving my email address to, but that are reputable. It is absolutely driving me crazy and feels a bit desperate. I am an avid online shopper. I feel I find the best deals for home and business on the web, but if I get one more “we noticed you looked at product X, can we interest you in this too,” email; I am going to scream. As a business owner, I understand the logic behind these types of transactional emails and as a marketer, I understand why so many brands are turning to email for their marketing purposes. I suppose this will be the marketing trend for 2014.

Social media marketing has gone from being “free,” to market and engage your customer to more of a “pay to play” environment. Granted, it was never entirely free to begin with if you factor in the cost of the time, effort and thought that goes into a successful campaign. Outside of that, the cost was free to minimal. Now these social networks are looking for ways to effectively monetize the audience and in a sense, power that they own. You want to put yourself in front of a large or targeted audience on social media networks? You now have to pay to do so. Facebook in particular has admitted that it’s algorithm works against you, but if you pay to promote, you can be in front of millions. Wink, wink.

For the past few months, marketers have been experimenting with some of the smaller and lesser known social media networks in an effort to migrate away from Facebook. It makes business sense from a budget perspective to not pay for something that was once free before, if you can get the same results elsewhere for free.

Social media networks have to look out for themselves and their shareholders (if they have them). At the end of the day, although we may enjoy using them and sharing on them, they are a business and they have to eat to make money. They are going to make changes that will benefit them and possibly not you and we have no control over that. Because of this, brands are looking to real estate, data and leverage that they do have control over. Websites and…ah, email lists… It’s very smart thinking. Brands that may have slacked off on email marketing before, are now dusting off and reviving those lists and their emails are filling my inbox.

This migration towards capitalizing on real estate that you own for marketing efforts, probably means that we will start seeing articles and posts about social media marketing being dead. We will see. I wrote a post a few months ago about whether email marketing was dead and then Facebook changed its algorithm (again), so it may die, but it also may be resurrected again. I do predict that if you aren’t already seeing an increase in marketing emails flooding your inbox, you will soon. It’s the next new trend. 🙂