Is e-mail marketing still a good platform to reach out to your customers or do they get completely ignored? What is the biggest benefit email brings to marketers? What’s the most important ingredient in good email outreach?
These are the questions I recently asked Joe Colopy, CEO of email marketing firm Bronto, and he was kind enough to spend a few minutes on video answering them.
What are your thoughts on e-mail marketing? If you have additional questions for Joe, feel free to leave them in the comments.
David spends his days focused on marketing communications strategies and execution. He blogs here regularly about integrated communications, PR and social media.
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Not having watched that video yet, I can say with 150% accuracy email marketing is very useful and receives more eyeballs than any other form of media distribution. The key is to place the right elements in the right places, no different than building a website.
I’d definitely agree that email marketing is still a very effective tool if you use it correctly. As Joe said, these emails can’t be a standalone effort for a brand, but a piece of a larger marketing campaign. Also, as he mentioned, it makes it extremely easy to measure the ROI of the campaign, which is tremendously valuable.
Another great video interview, David! Keep em coming!
Ari is 100% right. Email marketing is ranked as the #1 customer retention marketing program for a reason — it works. It’s all about turning a 1-time viewers/buyers/donator/… into a repeat one.
A few months ago, my wife and I were shopping online at Land of Nod. We had put some stuff in the “cart,” but didn’t purchase because we wanted to think about it. About 3 or 4 days later, we got a conversationally written email from Land of Nod saying they noticed we had some great stuff in our shopping cart and if we’re still mulling it over, they’d be happen to offer free shipping on the entire purchase, which was about $13, a decent percentage of the entire purchase and one of the reasons we were hesitating to buy. We clicked the link in the email and bought the goods.
My wife and I both commented that it was a great use of email. (She used to be in marketing, too, so we have weird conversations like that.)
Sounds like a great example of how email marketing is addressing shopping cart abandonment. We spend much of our time at Bronto making those type of solutions easy to do and move email marketing beyond the monthly newsletter. We’re just starting to scratch the surface of great marketing solutions like these.
I’m surprised no one has said anything yet about how cost effective e-mail marketing is (espcially when compared to other forms our promotion outreach such as direct mail…. ). Am I right?