Aussie marketers ‘wasting’ email medium with one in five emails going missing
A new report suggests that more than 20 per cent of emails sent by brands to consumers never make it to their target group’s inboxes.
Chairman of the US Direct Marketing Association Matt Blumberg has told Mumbrella the missing emails are hurting Australian marketers.
“Because email is relatively inexpensive people haven’t focused on this problem for a long time. But with one in five emails ‘going dark’ there is a huge opportunity cost to that,” said Blumberg, who is also the CEO of global email intelligence firm Return Path.
“It’s a waste of the customer acquisition expense, waste of email technology expense and customer service expense. So it is a significant challenge for marketers.”
I’d personally say the best way to ensure an email campaign is relevant is to ensure you’re sending quality content, for example, articles that people want to read and offers that are actually enticing. Many email newsletters miss the mark simply by virtue of assuming that their subscribers simply want to hear – something, anything – from them. The consequences of sending a boring, un-engaging newsletter are by far worse than losing 1 in 5 emails to the system.
With email providers like Google training their spam filters on engagement, ie. if emails from a sender regularly get clicked or opened on the other end, it pays for marketers to focus on their content first, before splitting hairs over technical solutions to up their delivery rates.
@Ros — very wise words. What’s more, since by using ‘read more’ links in an email you can track what interests people and what doesn’t, there’s really no excuse for sending them uninteresting content. After a couple of newsletter shots, you’ll know what your target public is interested in reading more about because the statistics will tell you.
B
Email is soooo last decade, come on guys, at least format them for Mobile.
Effective email programs need to be run by folks with an excellent understanding of the medium, the systems and infrastructure required as well as having an excellent grasp of marcomms and UX/design. In most companies, and more annoyingly media organisations, they do not seek or hire this type of skill set. There are some exceptions 😉