Email: The Energizer Bunny of Marketing

Social media hasn’t killed it and mobile technologies might actually be breathing new life into it. Pronounced dead or dying for at least the past decade, email marketing is proving to be more like the iconic Energizer Bunny — it keeps going, and going…

Last night at ActiveProspect headquarters, a panel of email marketing experts addressed a group of more than 60 marketing professionals on email’s enduring value, as well as on best practices for email-based lead generation and nurturing. The discussion took place as part of 512 Interactive‘s August meetup. 512 Interactive is a networking group for professionals in Austin, Texas who are interested in online and performance marketing.

The panel featured email industry veterans from UnsubCentral, a leading provider of email compliance, suppression, and opt-out management, and PostUp, a leading email marketing company. Pamela Parker, executive features editor of Marketing Land and Search Engine Land, moderated.

Panelists included:

• Brandon Badger, PostUp Director of Integration
• Robin Green, PostUp VP of Sales
• Cris Angelini, UnsubCentral Sales Director
• Todd Boullion, UnsubCentral General Manager

The Next Big Things in Email Marketing

The discussion closed with each panelist citing one or two current trends that’s reshaping email marketing. My favorites include:

• There are no longer bad times to send an email – Until recently, conventional wisdom held that the best time to send a marketing email was in the morning to coincide with the turning on of computers at the start of the work day. But most email is now read on mobile devices, so as long as the content is relevant and comes from a trusted source, sending after hours and weekends can actually improve campaign performance.
• Dedupe your current customers – Don’t irritate your current customers by sending them generic offers or offers for merchandise they already purchased. Only contact them with emails that are relevant, timely, and personalized.
• Pre-scrub unsubscribers – Some data append services identify consumers who frequently report marketing emails as spam, or subscribe and then quickly unsubscribe to email distributions. Save yourself the hassle of managing chronic unsubscribers by suppressing those addresses.

Join Us Next Time

The next 512 Interactive meetup will be held on a TBD date in October.