Email marketing

Grant Leboff: Dave, one of the things I wanted to speak to you about is email and its role, how you see it within the marketing mix today.

Dave Chaffey: I’m glad we’re looking at email because I think with the attention on social media, I’m not always sure it gets the attention it deserves. If you look almost across category, email is a fantastic way of both gaining customers and keeping them engaged. In fact, Custora, [https://www.custora.com/ ] which is a retail service in the US, found that email is the third biggest driver of sales after paid and natural search engine marketing. They also saw that email had gone up 4 times in the last 3 years in terms of acquisition. The reason for that is that retailers are using popups to capture email addresses with a great offer like 15% off your first order, eBags [https://www.ebags.com/ ] have. Then that email is driving conversion. It’s important in that sense. In business to business marketing as a way of nurturing leads, it’s still very important. I think any area where it’s dropping a little is in the younger audience, where social media, if you took say fashion in teen, youth audience, that is where email isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Grant Leboff: That’s interesting because when you talk about email, you talk about it for nurturing and other things like that. What about in terms of cold emailing? How do you see that? We’re talking about permission emailing. How would you see that in contradistinction between that and cold emailing itself.

Dave Chaffey: You’re right. On a privacy level, we’re not talking spam. It always has to be opt in, but there are opportunities for businesses and consumer brands to use publisher email lists. At Smart Insights, we actually offer this. We’ve got content partners or advertisers, as we call them, businesses like Marketo and LivePerson… We’ll actually charge them for access to our email list. Because they’ve got, we think, great content on doing digital marketing, our audience is actually quite happy to receive offers to download content so we’re driving leads to those brands. It’s not cold email. Maybe co-branded email is the technique that people can use. I think that again is a bit underestimated as a technique.

Grant Leboff:  I think what’s key about that, which you just said … I think we should highlight that for the viewing public … Is the fact that those brands. It’s co-branded with you, but more importantly, they’re giving value to the customer. There’s a perceived value … It’s not just buy from us today, is it?

Dave Chaffey: That’s right. It’s educational content, which is genuinely useful. Our members do actually say, “Thank you. This is good,” or they will re-subscribe to get that free educational content.

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