Email is Dead. Long Live Email.

Spammers have ruined it for everyone. Legit email marketers fight an ongoing battle for the inbox. Even though our email marketing is permission-based, some ISPs block us anyway. 

A recent study as reported by MediaPost brought up some interesting stats (emphasis mine):

Successful deliverability to consumers’ inboxes varies by ISP. Gmail, Google’s email service, is the most stringent US-based ISP for permission-based marketers to reach, according to the report, as 23% of emails that marketers sent to Gmail addresses did not reach the inbox.

So what’s the solution? Do we all switch to RSS-based communication? RSS is virtually spam-free. It fits the definition of permission-based marketing to a T. Yes, it’s got its drawbacks, but nothing that a few years and a few genius engineers can’t solve. Right? It’s a topic for another time. As we all know, email’s not going anywhere.

The problem? Your email sucks! As CopyBlogger puts it: “Many people will just mark you as a spammer for the crime of being boring.”

To be honest, I’ve clicked “Mark as Spam” on a newsletter where I could have easily spent the extra few seconds to unsubscribe the proper way. Google realizes this and has just created an auto-unsubscribe feature in Gmail. But by doing so you must report it as spam.

Gmail AutoUnsubscribe

Solution = Write Better Content.

The DMA still claims that the ROI on email still beats search and other marketing channels.

Call Gmail’s tactics extreme, but it should prompt us marketers to create a better email. Let’s be smarter about this. Let’s do our own R&D.

Keep reading this blog as we discuss how to improve email deliverability and learn to further expand our reach online.

3 Notes/ Hide

  1. jordanlyall posted this