This is a sentence I am always surprised to hear from our clients. So many people are under the impression that e-mails don’t work anymore. People are focused on social platforms, text messages and whatsapp.
We meet so many clients that have legacy data that they have not communicated with for a certain period of time. We start our consultations off with a few standard questions, one of them “How often do you communicate with your database?”. The answers vary from “once a week to maybe once every now and again, when we send off a newsletter, but we not sure emails work anymore.”
Well the answer is simple: E-Mail Marketing Still Works!!
Why you may ask, it is so old, people don’t react to e-mails, they don’t inbox and even when we do we get such a low open rate. This is what most marketing companies are telling clients today. At Surge, we believe in a much more holistic approach, each publishing channels have their advantages and disadvantages. E-mail is still one of the cheapest forms of communication, besides that it is still something that people look at every day, nearly every hour of the day!!
Sure, if you are spamming you will not get a great response, but if you are communicating with actual customers there is a very high possibility that they will react to your emails.
Recently we did an analysis for one of our clients on an old legacy list they had. The list was around 8,000+ records and we began communicating with them for around 6 – 8 months. The average open rate was around 23%. Client asked a very relevant question “Is that 23% the same people every time”. Instead of answering off the bat we looked into it. Out of the list of 8,000 over the period we communicated with them, there were in excess of 6,000 unique openers – that is an overall open rate in excess of 75%!!! 75% can you believe that. That means that 75% of an old legacy list actually saw their marketing messages. This particular list of theirs generated them over $250K worth of revenue!! And do you know what – for 6 months before that they had not communicated at all with this list. Granted – over this time they also had a a 35% overall unsubscribe rate, in our opinion this is pretty normal for a list that is that old.
TakeAway
Don’t push e-mail marketing aside. Communicate with your database. Clever Communication. Hyper Personalization. Engaging Customer Campaigns. Win.