Because it’s boring. Email is boring.
But more people use email than Facebook or Twitter. Combined. Every day. Still.
Email spans a wider demographic range than any other social technology application. We’re already seeing (in our own research and others) that age groups are defining social technologies…more on that later.
Email is ridiculously simple and it’s boring. Across many age groups, we’ve mastered email, whether that’s via a Web interface like Gmail or Hotmail or if we have an email client like Mail or Entourage or Thunderbird. Most of us already have our various “groups” that we send stuff to. We don’t think about it, we just “forward”, “reply” or create new, copy/paste or drag/drop and hit “send.” And we’re done. Boring. That’s when social change comes about from a technology; when it becomes boring.
Jody Williams won a nobel peace prize for land mine activism – mostly using email and faxes. Two boring technologies.
The phone eventually enabled the ability to have 911 service, of which a TV show was created. Because it was boring and we all knew how to dial a phone. In the 1930’s phones were pretty much banned in offices.
Facebook is not an email “killer” because it’s still complicated and not boring yet. Same thing with Twitter.
A new social media technology that is now pretty much boring is SMS/txt messaging and perhaps the first instance of txt messaging benefiting society was Haiti – that most of the money raised in the US, Canada and UK was through SMS donations. In the 2005 Orange Revolution in the Ukraine, it was txt messaging that played the key role in gathering people to protest the election results and promoted democracy. It’s getting boring.
So, what do you think? Is email still the number one social technology?
Best Practices•
on August 11th, 2008•
Tired of decreasing response rates to your email marketing efforts? Maybe you’re just noise like everyone else. Try leveraging a corporate blog by integrating your blog strategy with email marketing and you may find a whole new level of results. Here’s our experience:
We all receive a lot of emails in the run of a day. Next time you’re planning an email marketing campaign, think of how you use your email. Look at your own “inbox” and look to see how many marketing emails you subscribe to, and how many you open and read. I suspect the truth might disappoint you somewhat. Your customers think in a similar way.
So here’s a different approach. Continue the email marketing, but change the message and turn email marketing into a conversation spark. Print ads are a great example; the best ads say the least, yet spark a desire in us to buy, to investigate further or in other words – take action. Email marketing tactics can be leveraged with the same principle. The key here is understanding that email marketing is now just like a banner ad on a website, and its “interruptive” since people are online to “do” something, the Web is not passive like television – this is largely why banner ads don’t deliver good results.
Send your email, but use the principles of a print ad to create an action – the action being to drive them to the blog, not the usual Landing Page. Engage them in a conversation. Part of the reason email marketing messages fail is that as soon as you get such an email your first thought is “I’m being sold something.” So you filter them. You just know the email is going to send you to a Landing Page that’s going to pitch you a product – and you’re busy right now thank-you. It fails right out the gate for 98% of your target!
Using email to drive a prospect to a blog infers that there’s something “more” on the blog, since blogs are considered to be 2-way, the “sell” takes on a different tone. If you invite dialog on your blog, perhaps the prospect will say something there? That’s engagement, and you might also learn about a customer need, and be able to sell them more or handle an objection. So many companies send out emails today, it’s boring. Years ago businesses found high return rates over 8% from email marketing. Today email marketing is lucky to work like regular direct mail and deliver 1-3% responses.
We’re not saying stop the “direct sell” emails, but mix it up, engage the prospect. From the blog, you can drive them to relevant product pages. If they’re satisfied with the engagement in the blog, we’ve found they are 30% more likely to buy or give buying indicators. Your sales cycle is reduced, your leads are warmer and…you increase revenues! Blogs can be a powerful sales tool.