Email Marketing is Dead, Long Live Email Marketing!

As an e-commerce professional, I’ve often heard or read that email as a marketing channel was dying.  Many of the retailers I’ve worked for believed that SMS and chat bots were going to be the primary method of communication with our customers in a matter of years. However, email not only continues to be a strong email channel for companies but is also customers’ preferred method of communication with businesses according to this article.  It’s understandable for businesses to prefer email since also according to this article, for every $1 dollar spent on email companies see a return of $42 dollars. 

Email is effective because it meets customers where they are and email clients allow you to get work, personal, and school email all in one place. However, it is not fool-proof, and this article gives some good advice on how to make email a more effective channel like growing your list, controlling how often you email your list, and having clear measures of success.   In addition to this it’s also important to make sure the content is as optimized as possible.  And the best way to optimize email content is by making it as relevant as possible for the recipient through personalization.  

One of the initiatives that is probably on every retailer’s roadmap is personalization and this is especially important for email. As stated in the article referenced above, the best emails are “personal, targeted, and crafted with the customers’ objectives and objections in mind.” At my current company we are planning small optimizations like using recipients first names in the subject line.  We’re also building a “newsletter preferences” feature where recipients of email can choose the type of content or products they would like to hear about.  Collecting this first party information from users will get us closer to personalization and is a lower lift effort on the team than coding sophisticated algorithms. Along with personalization initiatives, we, like other retailers, still find email to be our best performing channel. And while SMS and other methods should be explored, we have a long way to go before we declare email a dead channel.