Over the past couple of years, we’ve beaten email with the ugly stick. The blame rests with faceless botnets, best practices ignoring batch and blasters, and the ever-innovative marketers proselytizing the death of email and the rise of social media. Collectively, these misanthropes made it easy ignore, or doubt, email’s place in the well-rounded marketing mix.
By now, we all know that email is here to stay. It’s the backbone of digital marketing, and easily integrated with other channels—namely social media, which I do believe in as a viable marketing channel. But content delivery is really where email excels. It’s the perfect—or near perfect—tool for delivering the content that creates the lasting value that converts leads into loyal customers.
Email is personal
Handing over an email address is a very personal act. Think about it. Through that same address the lead or customer communicates with family, friends, and colleagues. It’s a sign of trust to gift that address to a brand. It means they’re interested enough to receive more content and offers from your organization.
Social media gurus can make the same argument. But it’s easy to ignore a post on your Wall. It’s not so easy to overlook an email. This means that marketers have a responsibility to embrace that act of trust and deliver only relevant communications that impart true value to their leads and customers. If they do just that, ROI is sure to follow.
Segmentation
Database segmentation is the primary reason that email is so well suited for content delivery. Marketers can slice and dice their lists into segments based on buyer personas and then deliver tailored communications to those personas. This strategy is vital to ongoing marketing success. It drives engagement and ROI arguably better than any other email-related tactic.
If marketers can merge these segments with personalization tactics and behavioral data, then they have an incredibly powerful content delivery mechanism at their disposal.
Subscription type and sending frequency
Sophisticated email marketers know that handing the reins over to their subscribers ultimately creates a healthier relationship. With email, it’s easy to give that level of control to subscribers.
Just let the subscriber pick the kind of content they’re interested in, as well as the frequency at which they receive it. This type of choice creates an individually tailored channel that leads to loyalty and engagement.
A proven channel
Email is the perfect channel to accompany the rise of content marketing. With an unbeatable ability to deliver targeted content, integrate with other channels, and hand true choice to the customer, email ensures its continued place in the modern marketing mix.
Dave Scott, founder and CEO of list marketing and lead generation firm Marketfish.
