By Matt Blumberg

Here we go again: another obituary for email marketing.

This time it comes from, of all people, speakers at the Email Insider Summit. According to a MediaPost article, several executives feel that email marketing is on the decline, mainly because of the spam issue. Consumers and businesspeople are fed up with so much spam and marketers can’t get to their inboxes anyway. Woe is email.

I’m sure this won’t surprise you, but I beg to differ.

To insinuate that consumers and business executives are no longer
interested in receiving offers for relevant services and products
simply isn’t consistent with actual data. Through our networks alone we
see tens of thousands of email sign ups every day. Not put too fine a
point on it: every single day thousands of people – consumers, business
people, IT folks – check a box to get email offers then confirm that
desire by checking a link to opt-in. If the average user were sick of
email we’d see these numbers on the decline and that is most assuredly
not the case.

And you certainly don’t have to take our word for it. The DMA recently released data that proved the on-going strength of email. One of our top-brand retailer clients recently told us that her email subscribers spend at a much higher rate than non-subscribers. And a recent Marketing Experiments study showed that email list rental significantly outperformed search and on-site conversion in driving sales.

Lots of bad email doesn’t mean the end of email marketing, just like
click fraud doesn’t spell the end of search. It does mean that being
better than average isn’t even good enough. Your email needs to be
among the very best in order to keep your reputation and response
levels high.

The key for marketers is to reach out to highly targeted consumers
who want to receive their offer. Whether retention or acquisition, if
consumers find a marketer’s offer compelling and relevant they are less
likely to report the message as spam or delete it and are more likely
to respond. Creating great subscriber experiences will ensure that the
marketer’s maintains a good sender reputation keeping their messages in
the inbox across the largest number of receivers.

The really good news is that email marketers with sterling
reputations are going to have the most freedom to test content and to
use response-driving language. Marketers with poor reputations will
need to waste time and resources managing deliverability issues. Worst
of all they will be operating from a weak position in the marketplace.

So don’t write off email marketing as a channel for business.
Instead, work even harder to delight your subscribers by presenting
them with valuable and interesting content that is relevant to them.
This alone will ensure high response, high deliverability and overall
high yield from your email efforts.