Tying into my theme of social media, is the string of media channels that have to adapt as social media develops.
Does your business make use of e-newsletters, or mass email promotions? More than likely would be my best guess. It feels like nearly every time I visit a website, store or restaurant, I'm asked to sign up to join their 'super-savers' or 'VIP' club--and somewhere on their form they ask for my email address.
I used to think seriously before giving my email address, but it limited so much of what I could do online or prohibited me from having access to great discounts, so I usually caved. But I, and many of my friends, have out-smarted these email marketers. I give them the address to a dummy email account that I created. It is a real email address, but I only check it every few months (if at all) to clean it out. I maybe read 5 out of every 100 emails that I receive on that account. I loathe sorting through them; it's all junk and while the coupons might have been valuable, they weren't as valuable as the time it would have taken to sort through them and print them off.
So I have to ask--if say 1 in every 4 consumers gave a dummy email address like I do, how effective is email marketing really? Is it a waste of money?
A blog I ran across by a man named Scott Kraus predicted the death of email marketing--well not exactly. Rather, he predicted the death of email marketing as we know it.
I tend to agree. As social media becomes more social, and more interactive, one-way mass email communications from a brand to its consumer become less relevant. In fact, as fast as people are subscribing to email lists, they are unsubscribing--citing reasons like being emailed too frequently, receiving too many un-relevant emails, or receiving too many repetitive or boring emails.
The answer it seems is not to send more emails, but to send targeted, relevant emails to a more specific niche of comsumers.
Check out the blog here for more information.
