Effective Email Marketing For 2014

[engine]

There are enough challenges with e-mail marketing these days, so when Google announced it's caching images on it's servers, has this just made it tougher for marketers?

Gmail blows up e-mail marketing by caching all images on their servers [webmasterworld.com]

Additionally, the popularity of gmail and its default split inbox (social and promotions) has made a dent in the the traffic. How many of you are actually opening one of those inboxes?

I've seen a huge uptick in e-mail marketers selling massive mailing lists, and for next to nothing, too. It's no surprise to me that this is seems to be coupled with a huge increase in business-to-business e-mails from unrelated firms buying these lists and e-mailing everyone on the list.

Has e-mail marketing reached saturation?

How can we bring life back into e-mail marketing?

[GoNC]

IMO, email marketing has pretty much gone the way of the dodo bird :-(

Here's why:

1. The "next generation" doesn't even use email. They might not even know what it is. Their idea of email is Facebook or text*.

2. Spam filters are so restrictive that 90% of email marketing is going to be flagged as spam, even when it's an opt-in**.


* Several years ago, during the days of MySpace, I was helping my 15-year-old niece (well, I call her my niece... long story) to set up a Gmail account. Her first question: "who all do I know on there?"

Now, you might think that this was just the ignorance of a 15-year-old, but I'll remind you that, by this time, the internet had been publicly available for her entire life.

Today, she's 20 years old, and still doesn't have an email address, or know what one is. She can't even grasp the concept of why she'd want an email address.


** Spam filters definitely don't help. I recently bought a defunct website, along with their database of opt-in members and email addresses. After rebuilding the site, I used Vertical Response to send an email to the 3,000 members to let them know about the re-launch.

I was very careful to not use ANY spammy text. But still, I think less than 1% of the emails sent actually made it to an inbox.

I've considered using email marketing to announce new sites, since PPC is very expensive with a low ROI (in my industry), and spray-and-pray ads are even worse. But it's really not a viable option, if I can't trust that my email will reach the target, and really have no way of knowing whether it even does.