Blogs

It’s interesting to listen to the continual debate over the merits of email marketing and whether it has a future in the marketing mix. Naysayers tout the emergence of social media as the deathblow for email marketing but this could not be further from the truth. Social media is the perfect complement to the email channel (in fact social media is complementary to all web 1.0 channels). The principles that underpin social media are those that successful email marketers have adhered to since the channels’ inception: relevance, engagement and (taking) action.

Within the professional services sector, where I and Concep spend our time, there remains an awful lot of noise. There remains a mentality from Partners and Associates that whatever they have to say is worth sharing. The idea being if we send our content to all-and-sundry, some of it has to stick, right? Part of the problem has been the available technology and lack of education regarding best practice.

Other vertical markets within the B2B (and B2C) space are not immune from the issue of content “batch and blast” either. Yet in the legal industry, it is still very much the norm to blast out a client alert to a list of recipients and move immediately to the next task. The notion of a “marketing campaign” is lost and, although data such as opens and opt-outs might feed back to the firm CRM, no one is taking the time to look at the success of the mailing in its’ own right. Few marketers check reporting data to determine which links and files were of most relevance to the group of recipients (clients) on the whole. Or what pieces of content did these busy professionals take the time out of their day to seek more information on and how can we leverage this information? This intelligence is often right at the fingertips but no action is being taken, action desperately needed to turn an engaged recipient into a new business meeting.

Social media has made us all revisit the fact that marketing is no longer about “pushing” messages or content; it is about “pulling” subscribers, fans and followers toward our brand and engaging with them in relevant and meaningful dialogue.

A consumer brand’s Facebook page that simply pushes advertising messages and sales jargon to fans, with no thought to monitor responses and improve relevancy will be no more successful than a law firm that blasts client alerts with no attention paid to the engagement metrics that lead to improved relevance of content.

Until next week…