Social Email Marketing

Marketing relationships: why connecting and staying connected matters

I often write about the importance of valuable relationships on this blog. Some people don’t understand that I even focus on the relational aspect of email marketing and other marketing techniques that are often seen as pure direct marketing.

Make no mistake, however, this blog is about marketing and while I strongly believe in being authentic, conversational and ‘open’, I am not naïve.

Marketing is about results and I still have to find the first company that spend marketing budgets to be simply nice.

However, while corporate sharks and die-hard marketers will tell you that being nice does not work when it comes to making money, the truth is that it is effective.

Contradiction: email marketers find it hard to reach the inbox but at the same time don’t seem to care too much

Deliverability is a hot topic in email marketing today. There are many reasons for that: an increased volume of emails sent (email has recently been used more frequently due to the recession), a growth of lists, changing techniques at the ISPs to filter emails, etc.

The emphasis increasingly lies with relevance, content and interaction by and with the email recipients.

The ‘Email Marketing Industry Census 2010 report’ by Econsultancy, carried out in cooperation with Adestra, shows that the number of businesses claiming to have problems reaching their email subscribers’ mailboxes has increased by 3% compared to last year, reaching no less than 54%.