The Rumors of Email Marketing’s Death Have Been Greatly Overhyped By Morons
July 27th, 2007by On-On
I’ve been consulting on email marketing as part of the larger field of online marketing for a number of years, so it comes as no surprise to me when the digerati (i.e. - hyperventilating nerds with blogs) declare email DEAD as a form of online marketing for the 652nd time. R.I.P., email, your time is up! What a bunch of slack jawed dumbasses these people are. As if to buttress my point, they generally start with a bombastic headline and then completely retreat from their stance with a giant caveat by the end of their post. It’s as bad as sports writing or cable financial news networks, if not worse. Bloggers, making weathermen look prescient since the 1990s!
What brought this up was a brief comment discussion I got into with Mark Brownlow over at Email Marketing Reports -my first blogger circlejerk linkfest! Woooohoo, how exciting! Even though we probably disagree on a lot of finer points about where the lines are in email marketing, I think Mark’s blog is pretty damn informative as blogs go. Just to make sure, I stopped to read about six months worth of entries and it held up. Anyway, in response to my comments and of his own volition, Mark posted a roundup of positive comments and posts concerning the state of email marketing that were made by people with the correct number of chromosomes and who, consequently, breathe with their mouths closed (without aid of a paper bag).
Mark’s entry can be found here and has links to some halfway decent posts on the topic:
Email is dead. Long live email.
In particular, the retort to the recent spate of news stories and breathless blogger tirades about how “TEENS HAVE GIVEN UP ON EMAIL” is welcome. I caught that on the news today and when I heard it spoken aloud without a trace of irony I nearly spit the dummy. Morons.
As always, enjoy! Or don’t!
p.s. - I’ve decided that the best way to avoid scraping and feed hijacking is to curse profusely in your blog entries, rendering them un-fucking-suitable for commercial application.
July 27th, 2007 1:10 pm
Your kind comments are appreciated On-On. I once tried to do a timeline of “email is dead” headllines, but got bored halfway through and never completed it.
Cheers,
Mark
July 27th, 2007 11:42 pm
I think email is dying. For one, I know my brother and his friends check it less and less, as Facebook and texting are ways they keep in contact. Besides, I get thousands of spam messages per month in my gmail or yahoo inboxes. And then I get the garbage forwarded by my friends- the forward this joke chain, or send a picture of a cute-chipmunk-or-kitten-smiling-chain. I was in a business dinner with a couple clients, and they mentioned how their personal inboxes are cluttered to point of not even being worth checking. Their wives check it. So maybe there’s more opportunities to email market to women than there is to men and teens.
IMO, the amount of spam we receive has been a real turn-off, to the point where people have maybe five or six email accounts they use for site signups, so when the spam starts flowing, their real email won’t be cluttered. With spam filters becoming more advanced, especially with gmail and yahoo capturing almost 90% of the spam I receive and sending it automatically to the bulk folder, I just don’t see how email marketing can last much longer.
I do see the point Loren McDonald makes about email being the primary medium of two-way communication between you and your customers, but I don’t think its trust-building.