In fact, email marketing is very much alive and well, but not the way it was 10 or 20 years ago. Email marketing is not dead – on the contrary.
Email marketing has changed and become more efficient!
Gone are the days of collecting a large list of email addresses and wildly and unabashedly sending ads to that list, hoping that as many as possible would click on the links and buy something.
This eventually worked, and the marketers were happy. Until eventually the day came when email readers got fed up with this aggressive advertising and screamed "SPAM" at every email that somehow smelled like advertising.
If you want to do effective email marketing today, you can forget about the obvious ads. The only advertising that works in emails today is discount coupons and special prices. Everything else ends up in the trash.
Today's email marketing works differently:
- Build a list of potential customers interested in a topic or product.
- Send useful emails to that list that get read and clicked on.
- In the first few weeks, you build trust and take care of your list as if it were your own child.
- Once you've shown that you're really trying to be useful and not sell something, start introducing your own products or solutions to your readers.
- Those who are still interested at that point will buy sooner or later, everyone else will ignore the ads or unsubscribe.
The trick is to use different strategies than the "masses." If everyone is hard-core about advertising, turn the tables and only send valuable tips and solutions to problems via email.
This small difference determines whether email marketing is dead or alive in an individual case.
