Why email is back for good
It was my birthday recently, this particular birthday signifying that I am now officially old. One of the advantages of this is that I’ve been around long enough to see certain trends come full-circle – camouflage for instance – which can be amusing. In the business world, email acquisition had fallen out of fashion, but now it’s back with a vengeance.
When I started TBG in the early 2000s it was in the middle of the email acquisition gold rush. Email marketing was the new direct mail and it became an equally solid customer acquisition vehicle.
Then spam ruined it all. In a way, email marketing was a victim of its own success. Little or no delivery costs – when compared to a stamp – led to over-saturation, and email lost its shine. The problem took some time to solve, and by the time spam filters were good enough to cope, the rush for brands to acquire Facebook likes was the new thing. This was especially important for big brands as, unlike email databases, everyone could see how many likes each brand had and make comparisons with their competitors. People started spending endless hours on social media, neglecting their webmail accounts. Social media was now the ‘free’ marketing machine; some even forecast the death of email.
Then, just as with email, Facebook became over saturated with marketing messages. To both combat this and to make some cash, Facebook started tweaking its algorithms. Its users saw fewer and fewer posts from the brands that they like, which meant that Facebook could charge brands for the privilege. What now? Yes that’s right, email again!
To take full advantage of social media, a more advanced data-led approach is necessary. Email addresses are now used to match up data from various sources to gain a more complete picture of an individual customer’s behaviour. A company’s existing customer database, social data and third-party cookie data can all be tied together by a customer’s unique email address. This Big Data approach then opens up some amazing opportunities for insight, advanced targeting and the ability to determine the true value of social and mobile activity.
The main benefits of this data-led email strategy are:
- Email addresses identify your customers on social channels – enabling a business to track the real value of individual customers
- You can enhance your customer data with platform data (the social platforms your customers use) and conversation data (specifically what those people post or Tweet about publicly)
- Knowing how valuable customers are and what they are interested in means that you can segment your audience, which is much more powerful and actionable than ever before
- How? By matching email addresses with Facebook and Twitter accounts its possible to specifically target your segmented audiences on social media with tailored content
- By doing this you are naturally targeting those social media users across multiple devices – so you don’t need to worry if they are spending some time on their PC, some on their iPhone and the rest on their iPad – there is no escape
- By using DMPs this first party data (email addresses) can be linked to third party data (cookies) to get a more complete view of your customers’ behaviour – which can again be used for targeting (through cookie targeting options like FBX on Facebook)
All very powerful stuff.
So, is that it? No! We’re just getting started. As we know, the next big tech trends are wearables and the Internet of Things. What will both of these trends generate endless amounts of? That’s right, data. This data, though, is useless to advertisers without context. Linking the data back to the individuals who are producing it provides this context and allows us to process, analyse and use the data to accurately target consumers. An email address is the digital key that connects the data to the individual – which means that building an email database is back, and likely back for good.
Simon Mansell is the CEO of digital advertising company TBG. You can follow him on Twitter @simonmansell