The Future of E-Mail Marketing is…Texting?

E-mail marketing has been the bread and butter of digital marketing strategies for a long time – and why wouldn’t it be, when the Direct Marketing Association says e-mail brings in “$44 for every $1 spent” (Digital Marketing Strategy & Tactics, Jeremy Kagan, p. 63). That’s great ROI, plain and simple, and it’s not surprising when you consider the ubiquity of e-mail in day-to-day lives. But can ubiquity lead to fatigue, and possibly obsolescence?

Maybe not. But maybe yes. There is some compelling evidence that digital marketers may shift away from e-mail marketing and focus, instead, on the latest ubiquitous method of communication: Texting.  Adage reports that, “People read 99 percent of the texts they receive from brands, whereas they open emails from brands at a rate closer to 20 percent, according to Dennis Becker, CEO of Mobivity.” Naturally, brands have figured this out, and are starting to capitalize on it. Google, for example, is working with mobile operators to establish a texting marketing service, with a predicted market value of $74 billion.

While e-mail can act as a broad-reaching call to action (“Buy this!” “Sign up!” etc.), text message marketing establishes “…a personal connection with the consumer” (Adage), perhaps capable of stronger conversion rates, or at least stronger access to consumers’ attention – for now.

In this same article, Adage also notes that there’s “…a risk that [brands] will wind up annoying consumers with spam, driving them to flip the ‘block’ switch. ‘Once a channel is off, they never turn it back on,’ cautions Don White, CEO of Satisfi Labs, a data and technology platform that develops artificial intelligence to help brands manage messaging services.” After all, at one point, e-mail was the most intimate connection a brand could have to a consumer, and now we sub-divide our inboxes into promotions versus personal content to weed out brands’ messages from our parents’ or friends’. Who’s to say texting won’t meet the same fate, perhaps faster than e-mail?

The article is a fascinating read on the pros and cons of text message marketing, a space that will surely evolve rapidly in the coming years. This is a space that brands will be paying attention to, and as business leaders and consumers, we should be paying attention, too.