According to comScore, more than 10 billion video clips are viewed online every month -- providing companies big and small with an incredible opportunity for cost-effective branding, product display and demonstration. Ironically, the ability to incorporate streaming video into an email campaign was practiced in the early days of the commercial Internet, yet stymied when inbox providers and software developers started blocking javascript in email for obvious security reasons. With cutting-edge video technologies now available and the pent-up demand for video integration with email from both marketers and consumers, inbox providers are heeding the call by developing new programs for marketers to tinker with email video delivery.
To build on my colleagues' positions in previous postings, social media is eroding email's social use in spite of its reliance on the medium and desperate claims that these two mediums can exist symbiotically in their current forms. Just as email displaced the U.S. Postal's role as the primary choice for delivering love letters, summer camp news and vacation postcards, social media is rapidly overtaking email for these same correspondences for the 35 and younger crowd. If you're a B2B marketer you can skip reading the rest of this -- because I have yet to see LinkedIn and the like encroach on email's power in the business world. However, consumer marketers better pay attention, because your ability to achieve the same ROI year over year with email is going to be turned on its side.
Lead Generation and email list replenishment are always ongoing topics of thought amongst marketers, along with generating more revenue from publications and websites they publish.
In case you haven't kept up with the email marketing industry over the past few months, it has been star of glimmering hope for marketers enduring economic turmoil. In fact, the industry has been faring so well that many email service providers (ESPs) have announced record growth for 2008 and expect to do equally as well in 2009.
Even though demand for ESP services is high and clients are spending more, there is still a lot of competition. Now is the time to try to squeeze more value from your ESP, while many are fat and happy.
I always get a chuckle when my email marketing colleagues push "relevance" as an industry best practice. If we as marketing experts have to remind the common practitioner to ensure their message matches their market, it proves email marketing is an institution with bottom of the barrel admission standards. Based on my experience, most email marketers fail not with relevance, but rather with the timeliness of their messages. Despite the advanced timing features ESPs offer, email is treated like other mass marketing mediums by marketing executives. If you don't believe me just ask any CEO of an email service provider about the percentage of their clients who use their timing features. I can promise you an uncomfortable look on their face will emerge when you bring the subject up. If the main objective of commercial email is to sell (widgets, ideas, relationships, donations, etc.) then a message's timing trumps most other best practices. All top sales people will tell you the calendar is their best sales tool because it ensures timely follow up around specific purchasing cycles. Top sales people know that being in front of the customer at right time is far more valuable than frequent and blanketed calls. Therefore savvy email marketers have learned from their sales counterparts to view time as a holistic window into their customers' needs, timing campaigns according to specific dates, relationship cycles and behavior instead of obsessing over the right time of day to send email. Below are some examples about how the savvy email marketers use time to increase sales.
