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11 Feb Take care of your cockroach
Like them or loathe them, cockroaches are well known for their longevity. The cockroach is estimated to be at least 200 million years old. And since there are cockroach fossils dating back as far as 350 million years, they actually pre-date some dinosaurs!
So it was an interesting comparison made last week by the CEO of Newscred when he compared email marketing to the cockroach. Newscred market themselves as the Global Leader in Enterprise Content Marketing and they are well-respected in the field. The actual comment from CEO Shafqat Islam was:
“Email is like a cockroach, it will never die, it is still maybe the best marketing channel going. On the internet, a brand’s website and email list are the only two things you own. Everything else you rent. Email and web is what every brand should be focused on for building content and audiences.”
Our stats support this statement. When compared to other owned, paid and earned channels, we consistently see email performing the best in terms of delivering business and marketing objectives.
Most valuable asset
We typically value email the highest of all digital owned media for a number of reasons:
- The marketer can segment and tailor messages down to individual customers
- The customer has opted-in to receive it, so is highly engaged in the brand and message
- They are received in a personal context (a phone or personal computer)
- They typically include impactful images which stand out amidst other text-dominant emails
- Increasingly customers can add offers to loyalty accounts within the email itself, removing the need to visit a website
- Customers can keep them and use them at a later date (unlike display or social ads)
Beware over-use
Of course, many businesses already recognise the power of emailing their customers and it can become a drug, which some may overdose on. The danger of hammering your customer base with multiple emails is that they lose their efficacy, become an annoyance and your customers unsubscribe.
Many of the businesses we work with have passed this hump and now have sophisticated algorithms identifying the right message and offers for individual customers based on their previous purchasing behaviour. These are the ones who have harnessed the power of email to great effect for themselves and their commercial partners.
So we ask you to take care of your cockroach, nurture it, observe it, measure it and learn from it. Do that and it’ll be around for a few more years to come.