Is Email Marketing Heading for Extinction?
Web 2.0 could change business communications forever
by Per Löfgren of EuroContactPool
The most frequent criticism I’ve heard about the Apple iPhone is that it
'doesn’t handle email too well,' at least not when compared to a Blackberry.
When you look at the iPhone home screen you get an idea why. Email is there,
of course, but so is YouTube and SMS, and usually the free applications for
Facebook and MySpace Mobile.Why would Apple apparently place so little emphasis on email? The answer is
simple. For the young consumer, email isn’t the primary communications
channel that it is in the business world. A friend of mine who is the
principal of a school in Sweden tried to email the school list but got very
little response. When he asked his pupils why they hadn’t replied, the most common answer was that they hadn’t read his email.
Young people don’t communicate that much via email anymore. They don’t
devote time to checking their emails and so the feedback on sent emails is
slow and indirect. They prefer to communicate via faster and more direct
ways such as SMS, online communities, and web messaging.
There has been much hype about the Web 2.0 generation, and the 16-19-year-olds we were watching with some curiosity a few years ago are now the next
recruits into our businesses. My friend’s pupils will be our employees just
a few years from now.
Will they bring their own communications preferences into the workplace with
them, or adopt email as we 'old folks' do? My own view is that it will be
the former, just as the generation before ours brought computing into the
workplace and we brought the Internet and email.
It means that as managers, we have to learn to regulate, monitor, and track
communications within these almost anarchic, fast-moving virtual
environments. That will bring its own challenges.
As direct marketers, we have to recognize that communications channels will
change every few years, and that we will have to adapt our technologies or
risk missing some of our key target groups. As we have already seen in the
music sector, the use of online communities can potentially make marketing
budgets stretch further because members of those communities pass the
message to each other, as long as your offering is good enough to recommend!
We will also have to become more used to direct marketing being a two-way
process. Online reviewers and commentators are ruthless in their evaluation
of products and services and, for the first time, have the ability to make
their judgements visible to the world.
It seemed so much simpler to send out well-thought-out, now old-fashioned,
email and wait for the response. The Web 2.0 generation recruit in his or
her first job would probably view it with the same curious detachment as a
stone-age axe head. Companies must embrace the use of social media and even
more instant communication and work these methods into their marketing
outreach.
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About Per Löfgren
Per is an International B2B marketing, direct marketing and CRM specialist.
Currently with PAR, a Swedish direct marketing firm, he serves as the
Director for EuroContactPool, a pan-European b-to-b contact database. He has
been with the company since 2004 and has been instrumental in the launch of
many of the company’s initiatives. |