Is Email Marketing Dying?
We’re on day three of my hands being too sore to type all that much, so we’ll keep this one short.
I’ve seen this question many times, and got invited to a new mastermind group thing the other day. A couple of guys are talking about this in that group right now.
Is email marketing dead and is it going to be dead at some point in the near or distant future?
Let’s look into this quickly.
Is Email Marketing Dead?
Email marketing is not dead. It still produces massive returns on investment for anyone that does it effectively.
With a list of one hundred that has an open rate of fifty percent and click through rates of ten to twenty percent, you can make money. With the right offer, you can make a huge amount of money.
If you don’t have a good offer, you need to change that.
If you don’t get very high open rates, then you need to change that.
When you don’t get good click through rates, you need to change that too.
I see people talk about, “the average open rate is like twelve percent and click through rates are one percent and maybe if you have a million customers you’ll get two sales…”
And I think to myself, “If that’s the average, why would you aim to be average?”
Forget the figures that other people push out there. Most email marketing is rubbish and most people don’t know what they’re doing.
Meanwhile, there are guys with no technology (outside of a simple autoresponder,) no budget (they get all their sign ups organically) and no particular superhuman offers who do incredibly well at email marketing.
Email marketing isn’t dead, but will it be in the future?
Email Marketing… Will It Be Dead In The Future?
I can’t conceive of email marketing dying or becoming less effective any time soon.
My litmus test for this is whether the people who pay big money for direct response copy are abandoning email in favour of other stuff… which they aren’t.
In fact, it’s almost the opposite and I’ve noticed that it’s a good thing for copywriters, online small guys and people with no budgets.
If anything, the trend is to go with less tech and less complicated emails.
A couple of years back, there was a push to have all kinds of weird embedded stuff in emails; videos, images, complicated customisation features and interactive stuff.
People didn’t like that it seems, and there’s been a recent switch back to a simple one-to-one conversation through text atmosphere.
This is fantastic if you’re a copywriter who isn’t a videographer. It’s also great if you’re a small business person that only has fifty subscribers and doesn’t have the budget to buy some super-responder that sings, dances and gives your readers their personalised weather update for the day.
That said…
Beat A Dead Horse, Jamie: It’s All In The Skill
I talk a lot about building skills.
The same is true of email marketing.
Email marketing is a medium. It follows the same basic principles as direct mail marketing used to follow. You establish a one-to-one relationship with the potential customer and then you create a series of Yes ladders over time, leading them to become a customer and then a repeat, valued customer.
When the world switched from physical mail to email, direct response copywriters didn’t go bust. They just imported the same skills and writing style from direct mail and physical letters into the digital world.
I implore you to do the same.
If email marketing stops working (it won’t) and you have to learn some other form of marketing (you should) then simply take the skills and apply them to the medium in question.
So if Instagram hits it big, you write captions and layer your headline as an “inspiration quote” over some picture of a bikini bum or a mountain with on the Oceanside.
If video is popular, you hire some pretty person to read your sales letter out while smiling nicely.
Email is the medium. The skill is in building a personal relationship with your readers/viewers/listeners.
And that skill hasn’t changed. Learn the direct marketing principles and win.