Canadian Marketing Blog

What is your view on Email Marketing ?

What is your view on the state of e-mail marketing, is dying or thriving?

Will email survive as instant messaging and RSS start to take hold? Will new techonologies hold the same promise and return on investment seen with email? What will the future look like when the generation that grew up on the net hits the workforce and becomes the driving force in the economy?

I wrote a post over at One Degree and received some comments there. Now I want to hear from you over here in support the upcoming CMA “Optimizing E-mail for Better Results“ breakfast roundtable.

What questions would you like the “Optimizing E-mail for Better Results“ rountable to address at the upcoming CMA – Canadian Marketing Association breakfast event on March 7 which I will help moderate.

Here is your call-to-action:

Respond in one of two ways and join the conversation:
1. Leave a comment here or at One Degree
2. Call my comment line at The Client Side podcast and leave an audio comment 1 206 666 2242 which I will include as part of the roster of questions for the panel and will include on the next episode of my podcast.

(Of course, you can always show up and ask a question from the audience at the event - we'd love that too!)

Looking forward to hearing from you.

I'm working on a post on this topic but just wanted to chime in on the IM generation. I might use IM for conversations, but that's not email's forte. Email is a grownup tool. And yes, IM Generation, you, too, shall be assimilated!

I love IM for conversations. But not for either official business or for items where I need to be able to store, sort and search. It could be that IM will get better integrated into outlook like IBM has with Sametime (I hope! you should see how well it works with your BlackBerry), but meantime we all use email. It just works, it's deliverable across multiple media, I can leave it to respond to later, sort it, filter it, etc.

What I think we are talking about long term is delivery channels and how best to deliver (push) customized messages, whether it's email that can be read on a PC or a smartphone, via RSS feed, podcast, webcast, etc. I see more emphasis being placed in future on being able to deliver the information (or offers) customers want via their preferred communications channel.

Michael posted on http://www.theclientsideblog.com about being overwhelmed by social media -- and he's immersed in this space! Imagine your customers with aging parents, children to look after and lives to balance. They don't have time to come to you. But they will give you permission to slip something in the door if you respect their time by being relevant, or better yet being helpful.

Maybe the focus should be more on techniques to collect and manage data, and how to turn it into really great content.

If done correctly, email marketing can be a very effective method of promotion. If done incorrectly, you're simply wasting your time and money.

Just thought I'd post a link to Jeanne Jenning's book The Email Marketing Kit over at SitePoint for people who are new to Email marketing. I used it when I first started and it has some great tips and techniques for maximizing your email campaigns.

http://www.sitepoint.com/launch/c6ac756/3/84