Blog Post

Is Email Marketing Dead ?

23. June 2020 /

This is the narrative being increasingly used in a pretty transparent, and to be honest, lazy tactic in the market place.

More often than not, it’s being deployed as a fear tactic for marketers to push whatever it is they’re selling.

A classic FOMO strategy backed up by almost no logic and even less statistics.

The reality is that email marketing is very much still alive.

And the statistics prove it.

The only thing that’s dead is a little creativity.

And SPAM.

Is it harder to get high open rates and engagement via email?

Yes.

Does it take a little more work, research and thought to get results from email marketing in 2020?

Yes.

Is email marketing dead?

Absolutely not.

I usually brush up on my email marketing best practices studying once every 4 to 6 months since the market place changes so rapidly.

And so I recently spent a few hours and dived a bit deeper into what’s working in 2020 with regards to email marketing.

Here are some key points from my research.

Keep it conversational:

The traditional sales type emails are working less and less. It may be that the email servers are punishing these type of emails and sending them to spam, or consumers are just becoming wise to transparent sales tactics (or both).

Either way, the more conversational you can be with your emails, the better response you can expect

Content is King (still):

As suspected the content of your emails remains one of the biggest factors for results in email marketing.

Now, more than ever, your content needs to be unique, engaging, authentic and precise and to the point.

Respect peoples time.

You don’t have to use exclusively short emails but absolutely avoid waffle for the sake of it.

Video is huge

People love being sent videos in their emails.

This is one I suspected and knew I should have been doing more of for a while.

But sending regular personalized videos to your subscribers is an excellent way to create intimacy and increase engagement.

These are just a few of the key findings from my research.

8 Comments

  • Kathryn McClatchy

    18. July 2020 at 19:17

    Adding video is something I know I should do, but still haven’t figured out a best practice or workflow that works for me consistently. Would love to know what is working for others…
    Thanks for sharing what you are finding!

  • Mike

    3. September 2020 at 8:12

    Yeah definitely email is not dead. But it’s interesting to think about what could replace it. What will die (I think) is bad email. Soon people will read emails less and listen more on their google home/goolge play. And that means google will get better at weeding out the emails that are not important. Google already makes recommendations in your inbox to delete senders whose emails you haven’t opened in the past 30 days. It also decides for you which emails are spam, which are promotional and which get a spot in your inbox. All this is a step toward AI deciding what you want to read and what you don’t. Soon you’ll say “hey google, read my emails” and google will only read the emails it considers most valuable. Lesson: Make your emails valuable.

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