Is Email Marketing Dead?

In this guest post, James Bennett (pictured below), chief experience officer at Kalido, discusses whether or not email still has a role in a successful marketing campaign.

James Bennett

Email marketing has long been the bread and butter for marketers to build loyalty, trust and brand awareness. However, in a time when audiences are getting harder to reach, and it’s harder than ever to make email campaigns successful, is it time we said goodbye to email marketing?

Not just yet.

We need to stop being so heavily reliant on it as a sole tactic in reaching target audiences and instead be planning a more integrated, personalised experience across multiple channels.

Rather than broadcasting the same message to all customers via email, customers could be experiencing a series of personalised interactions with your brand across a multitude of channels, including websites, text messages, mobile push notifications, social media and direct mail, all based on a robust personalised customer experience model.

To create a campaign that incorporates a personalised customer experience, you have to think about the following:

Pull your data out of silos

To create a personalised customer experience, the right data is needed. However, many companies are unable to use the relevant data as it is often held in silos. Different organisational departments or divisions frequently store data in multiple and separated storage places, and access is difficult to piece together.

To get the desired result, the right data has to be pulled out of these silos and made accessible to marketing and technology teams so they can create and deliver a customised experience for the customer.

Pulling data from these silos can be difficult. It can be costly, and there may be a need for changing internal process for how data is stored and accessed. It also typically requires a change in workplace culture to collaborate and share data within the company, and seeking approval from the right people that pulling data out of the silos is the right decision.

However, overcoming these barriers is all worth it when you can create a personalised customer experience that will transform the way the company operates.

An integrated campaign

Many businesses use one channel at a time without considering the full customer journey. In this ‘multi-channel touch point’ world, customers interact with your business through a number of different channels such as your retail store, call centre, website and mobile app. So, if you are just communicating via one channel, you may not be fully reaching your customer.

Not only is it important to communicate via multiple channels, but it is equally important that each communication is integrated so the different channels work together in delivering your message. For example, you don’t want to be publishing competing messages in emails to what’s being posted on Facebook. The key is ensuring that all messages are relevant to the customer.

While each channel should utilise different language, it is important to keep the messaging consistent and to use your customer data to reach your audience in the channel they are most likely to be using.

Make it smooth

Often the delivery of a campaign is left to the technical teams in the company, as they are in charge of the platforms. This can sometimes be problematic, as platforms can become rigid and fragile.

Each member of the campaign process needs to be aligned, so think about your communication and how to keep everyone working towards the same objectives – the customer.

Also, look at how to make the campaign run as smoothly as possible. The less moving parts, the less trouble you will have delivering your campaign.

Email marketing isn’t dead. We just need to start integrating multiple channels to create personalised customer experiences. To do this, think about the accessibility of the right data, integrating the marketing platforms to cohesively enable all your channels, and ways to make the experience as smooth as possible.

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Chris Taylor Designworks James Bennett Screen Envy