9,000 E-mails? Association E-Marketers Face Tough Competition
E-mail marketing has never been so popular, thanks to the weak economy and increased use of the Internet by consumers and members. What stopped me cold as I skimmed a press release about a new report from Forrester Research Inc. was the company’s prediction that “in five years, consumers will be deluged with more than 9,000 email marketing messages annually.”
More broadly, the report predicts spending on e-mail marketing will jump by almost 11% annually to $2 billion by 2014.
But gosh, am I seriously going to have to delete or respond to 9,000 e-mail pitches a year? The vision of my graying self, hips wider than a boat from camping out in my desk chair trying to empty an in-box exploding with don’t-ya-want-it e-mails, is very depressing. Life is too short.
And that’s just the receiver’s viewpoint. What about us as the senders? Many associations are already taxed with complaints from members about sending them too many e-mails. How will we compete against 8,900-odd other messages?
“By 2014, direct marketers will waste $144 million on e-mails that never reach their primary target,” says Forrester Research Vice President and Principal Analyst David Daniels. “Successful direct marketing pros will alter their tactics to overcome inbox clutter and increase relevancy.”
So there’s the challenge. It’s not a new one, but now it seems more urgent than ever. Association marketers, not to mention the entire staff, must explore new ways to showcase our products and services through memorable, persuasive language and vehicles that make clear their true value.
And it’s not a one-step process. The Forrester report also predicts that so-called “retention emails”—those that consumers have agreed to receive—“will account for more than a one-third of all marketing messages in consumers’ inboxes by 2014, representing increased competition for marketers.” That means we have to first keep ourselves on the permissions list of our people and stop annoying them with e-blasts in which they have no stake or interest.
And we have to be more assertive about training our staffs in the art of using social media as a legitimate business tool. Several recent conversations I had with members reminded me how tentative our sector can be, even about piloting something such as a conference Twitter stream, a CEO blog, or an education session held in Second Life.
According to Daniels, “The use of e-mail in social networks will be one of the biggest challenges for direct marketers. Over the next five years, marketers must bridge the gap between social and traditional inboxes with social sharing tools.”
So let’s keep the conversation flowing about how to ensure that our members keep us on their “permissions” list for our marketing materials—and then act accordingly. Ideas?
| | Permalink |
Comments
One of the keys to success will be effective management of the association's data.
It's one thing to simply manage an "opt in" or "opt out" list for our messages. It's another thing to be able to communicate effectively with our members and customers based on their interests, as identified by what the claim as their interests as well as all the other interactions they have with us on a daily basis (e.g., products they purchase, events they attend, downloads they grab from our website, etc.).
The most successful associations will be those that establish effective data management policies and procedures and have a data management strategy in place that includes how they will manage marketing and other communications with their members and customers.
Posted by: Wes Trochlil | June 22, 2009 1:55 PM
From my perspective I value the opportunities presented by email marketing campaigns and techniques as a new arsenal of communication vehicles where we, as associations, are able to effectively distribute messaging to our members. I recall similar "OMG" predictions several years ago as the Do Not Call List generated legislative action to prevent the unauthorized solicitations of facsimile transmissions - and the email component/implementation was almost an afterthought. True, if we only focus on the numbers or the projections of numbers, the task can become almost too daunting to even consider.
I believe that the real advantage to association marketing, relies on our abilities to thoroughly understand our audience and speak to them in ways and through vehicles that they will respond to. A response that says, "Enough already with another email," will certainly not place any association on the "must open" list of its members - and likewise, a Twitter exercise that has no followers will not accomplish our goals. We must be cognizant of the marketing outreach of our own efforts, coupled with an anticipated understanding of what else is in our membership's in-box, and on their phones.
The real competition, in my opinion, is the race to relevance - and whether the campaign is generated by an association or a service or product - the goal and resulting effectiveness will ultimately be determined by the effort's ability to speak to the audience in a meaningful way - by 2014, I suspect the means of delivery may be well beyond the notion of emails, or even social media ... our focus (and challenge) should be on staying ahead of the pertinence curve and avoiding marketing for the sake of trends or forecasts.
Posted by: Michael Robinson | June 22, 2009 2:43 PM
I put that 9,000 in a calculator and come up with a 24/day rate. I'm pretty much there if I include the bizarre long-format phishing messages I get from African & European countries every year. My spam filter is so efficient that it puts my "notes to self" in Junk Mail. I tend to ignore legimate messages from my utility companies and banks because they are written in the same idiom. Plus associations whose membership I dropped several years ago write weekly to push seminars, squeezing out notices I'd otherwise pay attention to from ASAE.
To me it's a problem without a solution. If I don't have time to visit websites to find events or content already, I'm less likely to use social media platforms to do the same thing--they also use push, just like email, but they aren't really narrowcasted, segmentable communications, they just go to the convenience sample of people like me who hooked into that particular community for whatever reason.
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | June 24, 2009 11:31 AM