Email Communications is Criminally Underrated (Still)

Email com­mu­nic­a­tions are crim­in­ally underrated.

I think of email com­mu­nic­a­tions instead of email mar­ket­ing. The email inbox is a two-way com­mu­nic­a­tion chan­nel and should be con­sidered that way.

Still, email is far from sexy.

We’re all spammed by mar­ket­ing emails left and right. The ton­al­ity can typ­ic­ally be described as cor­por­ate cringe, filled with plat­it­udes. How do we make email work as PR professionals?

Here we go:

No One Loves Getting Marketing Emails

We all struggle with main­tain­ing our inboxes and get­ting our email addresses abused by spam­mers. Email mar­ket­ing can’t be described as the sex­i­est of spaces to fight for. It’s like no one wants you there in the first place.

And it gets worse:

So many com­pan­ies are strug­gling to put out their peri­od­ic news­let­ters. So many mar­ket­ing depart­ments scramble to write news­let­ter con­tent that makes sense to the sub­scribers. Many tra­di­tion­al com­pan­ies have chosen the insanely bor­ing route of post­ing head­lines and snip­pets from their latest news­room or blog updates.

And with all of the hype around vari­ous social net­works, one might think that email mar­ket­ing should at least be a thing of the past. However, such a con­clu­sion couldn’t be more wrong. Email mar­ket­ing is still — and will likely con­tin­ue to be — the most potent of digit­al mar­ket­ing channels.

How can this be?

From a PR per­spect­ive, most social net­works have a massive dis­ad­vant­age; the brand doesn’t have pro­pri­et­ary audi­ence own­er­ship. Sure, your busi­ness can accu­mu­late fol­low­ers and fans across many social net­works, but when push comes to shove, we’re all at the mercy of just a few third-party algorithms. In email mar­ket­ing, this isn’t the case.

The Power of Permission Marketing

Both social net­works and email mar­ket­ing have the immense advant­age of being opt-in (pull rather than push). As Seth Godin described it, hav­ing an opted-in audi­ence could also be labelled per­mis­sion mar­ket­ing:

“Permission mar­ket­ing is the priv­ilege (not the right) of deliv­er­ing anti­cip­ated, per­son­al and rel­ev­ant mes­sages to people who actu­ally want to get them.”
— Seth Godin

Still, email mar­ket­ing is prone to abuse. There’s noth­ing stop­ping any­one from send­ing out lots of emails to a lot of people. Organised spam­mers and mal­ware dis­trib­ut­ors have taken this the fur­thest, but many com­pan­ies are out there doing email mar­ket­ing all wrong. They’re dimin­ish­ing a per­fect mar­ket­ing chan­nel for them­selves and, more import­antly, for others.

10 Best Practices for Email Marketing

When people ask me after sem­inars or dur­ing work­shops, I have some essen­tial advice for com­pan­ies who are inter­ested in doing email mar­ket­ing right:

Affiliate: I use Mailchimp as my default email list manager.

Affiliate: I use Email List Validation to pro­tect my sender’s repu­ta­tion by keep­ing my PR email lists free from boun­cing emails.