The effectiveness and relevancy of email marketing in todays technical landscape is a topic that I see pop in and out of marketing debates.  There is a school of thought that sees email marketing as a dead tactic and not relevant.  I think this thought is primarily because it’s no longer the cool trendy marketing item that everyone is buzzing about.  Email marketing was born during the email boom; during the age of AOL, Hotmail and the emergence of Yahoo.  By the way, as a side note; if you still have an AOL email address that you actively use, get rid of it.  It dates you.

I feel that as long as email inboxes exist and email is used as a way to communicate with people, email marketing will continue to exist.  I also believe that it is still a relevant tactic.  I feel the relevancy is lost in the way the tactic is used.  The way it was first used is similar to the way junk mail is used in “snail mail.”  I think direct mail marketing is a relevant and useful tactic, but most businesses use it in a way that is not very effective or relevant to what people want today.

That is the same problem with email marketing.  Most businesses are still approaching it in the same way it was approached during its inception.  Times have changed and people have changed.  I use the term consumer interchangeably with the word “people,” because consumers are people.  Like with snail mail, when junk mail (direct mail advertisements) first appeared in their mailboxes, they were new, interesting and gave them a reason to look at them.  Now, they are in most cases, instantly trashed and discarded.  A business today, has to send out twice if not triple the amount of mailers to receive the same type of results and response that would have been gotten many years ago.

Why, because people became desensitized to them.  They were bombarded with them and it made checking the mail a negative experience if all you often found were bills and advertisements for things you did not want nor need.  The same thing has happened with email.  At first, you loved to check your email to see if someone sent you anything; a note, a message, a poem, a chain letter…  Now, email accounts are quickly abandoned due to malicious hackers, viruses, spammers and unsolicited advertisements.

Rules were put in place just like with junk snail mail to try to cut down on unsolicited emails and subscriptions to lists.  You are supposed to be able to unsubscribe easily and technically you have to commit some action in order to be subscribed to a list.  The lines are often blurred when it comes to the action that is committed (I handed you my business card at a networking event) and not everyone uses an email service to send their emails (being cc’d with 500 other people on an email that you can’t unsubscribe from).

People have become desensitized to email marketing in the same way.  Businesses that buy email mailing lists like direct mail marketers do, will not see the same effectiveness that they would have from a list with subscribers who willingly signed up.  They will also see less unsubscribers if they also provide value in some way to those that have signed up.  What constitutes value is different for each business.  For one business, the value may be in coupons, exclusive offers and secret sales.  For another, it could be just an inside look into that brand’s corporate culture.

The key to it all is the people.  The consumer.  The one’s that you are actually trying to market and advertise to.  If businesses place a high priority on learning whom their consumers are as people and what those people want from them, they can actually be very successful with a marketing campaign.  The campaign that works for them might not actually be a direct line to a sale or purchase, but an indirect one.  Something else to keep in mind is that email marketing can work as a complementary tactic in an overall marketing strategy or campaign.

Email marketing is not irrelevant or dead.  It just has to be used and approached differently from how it was done at its birth.