Recession, Bad for Marketing - Great for Email Marketing

Waking up Tuesday morning to CNBC’s Becky Quick telling me the Dow Jones Futures were down almost 600 points after a surprise three quarter of a point Fed rate cut really put a damper on my day.  As I watched the real-time chart tick lower, my stomach started to knot, leaving me in a dizzying stupor.

It’s times like these that bring me back to my days as a small cap equities analyst where I would question CFOs about where they planned to cut and by how much.  The first answer out of their mouths was almost always “non-revenue generating jobs” such as customer and administrative support.  The second most common answer is “advertising and marketing.”  The second answer always baffled me especially from companies that aren’t leveraged.

In a time of a recession, companies with access to capital have an unusual opportunity to take market share as they are able to sustain or increase their marketing budgets.  Whenever a CFO with a decent to strong cash position told me that he or she were going to slash their marketing budget going into an economic downturn, I eventually sold the company’s stock and bought the competitor’s with the intention to keep its marketing budget intact.  This strategy worked well – especially in the services sectors.

Although most people do suffer from a recession, the winners do emerge and I’m confident that email marketing could get a gold medal.  During the 2001-2002 recession, email marketing was just on the cusp of becoming widely adopted but had yet to make the necessary penetration to become a formidable part of the promotional mix.  Most notably, the cost per email hovered around $0.05, way below the cost of a direct mail piece yet still prohibitive for most companies to implement two or three times a week on a large scale.  Fast forward to 2008, email marketing is now one of the least expensive marketing channels, and according to the DMA, a very high performer.  Today, most email marketers are paying under a penny per email however email marketing only claims a small part of the average marketing budget.  Even though email marketing has become widespread, email marketers, on a larger scale, are still not leveraging the medium’s true potential such as advanced personalization, delivery monitoring and management and integration with third party systems. 

This gap, coupled with a potential economic downturn, presents a unique opportunity for email marketers to lobby their CEOs/CFOs for a larger slice of their marketing budget.  Email marketers have already proven that email marketing works well now is their opportunity to reclaim it as the most relevant push channel available and the biggest bang for the buck.