Comments on: Email Great Medium For Reaching Old, Stupid People

By: James Gross

James Gross — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 21:13:11 +0000

I agree with you Ben, when there is a customer relationship(a real one, not one where you accidentally checked a box), email offers a great way to not only fulfill but also create demand. Amazon does an amazing job for me with fulfilling and in creating demand with the emails that I get from them. They are not perfect, but they are good enough that I don’t mind them when they are off.

To your point Michael to focus on email to create or even fulfill demand when it wasn’t asked for, is a bad way to spend time and money.

By: Ben Kunz

Ben Kunz — Sat, 31 May 2008 02:11:28 +0000

Sorry, Joshua, I gotta back Miconian here. The original email article is very misleading and positions email marketing as “the best” online media, ahead of search, which is a bit laughable. Who is a better respondent with a higher propensity to convert to lead and sale and then buy more? A user actively looking for the product via Google, or someone responding to an unsolicited email offer?

I’m sure the ROI on email marketing is 4,500% since it costs almost nothing to fill up inboxes with electrons, but that logic is flawed. One could say the ROI on press releases is 1,000,000% given the small cost of a stamp or single email to a major paper vs. the hundreds of thousands of readers who might see it, but I would not hinge most of my marketing on PR either.

Email marketing is a potentially viable campaign component, best used if there is already an existing customer relationship. It is also annoying to non-customers, risks an adverse impact by alienating prospects who do not respond, as a collective whole has a tragedy-of-the-commons effect of spoiling the entire email channel, and has a historic trend of diminishing returns. Which reminds me, it may be time to change my Gmail account again to get away from the stuff. But wait. Just got a great offer from some guy in Nigeria …

By: miconian

miconian — Sat, 31 May 2008 00:05:18 +0000

Josh, thanks for commenting. When I said "integrated marketing," I actually meant special sponsorships or promotions that would be associated or integrated with the content or co-branded with the publisher, as opposed to a more traditional campaign that can be described purely in terms of banners, emails, and search. I find no fault with your company or with the data itself; I'm sure it's all completely on the level, and it tells an interesting story as far as it goes. But the context in which MarketingCharts (and MediaBuyerPlanner, for that matter) presents it is, to me, disappointingly reductive.

By: Joshua Baer

Joshua Baer — Fri, 30 May 2008 19:19:30 +0000

As to email in an integrated marketing effert, it looks like you didn’t read past the headline. In the article you link to, it explains that is usually part of an integrated marketing effort that includes search and display.

“Some 67% of respondents stated that email has helped boost sales through other channels. In these scenarios, email is a tool for sales as well as a media channel. Search is the favored channel for complementing the email channel.”