Introduction
The end of emailing in 2024? As new platforms emerge and consumer behaviors evolve, email marketing, once a mainstay of prospecting and communication, finds itself at a turning point. This article explores whether email marketing is destined for extinction or whether it can still reinvent itself to remain relevant in the arsenal of modern marketers.
What is emailing?
Emailing, also known as email marketing, is a digital communication technique used by companies to send messages directly to a targeted group of consumers or professionals via email. This direct marketing tool not only communicates information, but also arouses interest, reinforces customer loyalty, and encourages specific actions such as purchasing products or subscribing to services.
The strength of emailing lies in its ability to reach a large audience of potential customers with personalized, measurable emails. Each campaign can be tailored to reach the recipient in a way that’s relevant to their interests and previous behavior, increasing the chances of conversion.
What’s more, the results of each email campaign are easily traceable, providing companies with valuable data on the effectiveness of their marketing efforts.
Using various elements such as text, images and links, emailing enables you to create rich, engaging campaigns. These emails can be used for a variety of purposes: informing customers about new products, promoting special offers, or even collecting feedback. Properly executed, emailing is a fundamental pillar of a company’s marketing strategy, integrating a continuous dialogue with its customers while optimizing overall sales strategies.
Why is email marketing less successful in 2024?
Over the years, emailing has faced a number of challenges that have eroded its effectiveness as a dominant marketing tool. Several factors contribute to this drop in performance, which are essential for any company wishing to adjust its digital marketing and communications strategies.
Firstly, the overabundance of emails has led to consumer saturation. Every day, inboxes are flooded with multiple offers and newsletters, making it difficult for a brand to stand out from the crowd. This information overload can lead to audience fatigue and disengagement, often resulting in emails being ignored or deleted without being opened.
Secondly, the evolution of personal data protection regulations, such as the RGPD in Europe, has tightened the rules around the acquisition and use of personal data. These regulations are forcing companies to adopt more transparent and consensual emailing practices, limiting the opportunities to reach a large audience without prior consent.
What’s more, the emergence of new communication technologies and platforms has diversified the ways in which consumers prefer to receive and interact with content. Social networks, instant messaging applications and video content platforms offer direct and often more dynamic alternatives to emailing. This is true in B2C, but also in B2B. Although emailing is still the most common way for companies to communicate, it is becoming increasingly accepted and even appreciated to prospect via professional social networks such as Linkedin.
These channels enable real-time interaction and are perceived as more personal and engaging by users, which can diminish the relative appeal of email.
Finally, the effectiveness of emailing is also being put to the test by the development of more sophisticated filtering technologies. Increasingly powerful spam filters can prevent marketing emails from reaching the inbox, reducing their visibility and potential impact. This was particularly the case in February 2024, when several messaging services such as Gmail announced a tightening of spamming rules, making any strategy that sent more than 1,000 email addresses per day totally obsolete.
Faced with these challenges, it’s crucial for companies to re-evaluate the use of emailing in their marketing mix and consider integrating other marketing tools and strategies to remain competitive and relevant in today’s digital landscape.
How to optimize your email campaigns
To ensure that your emails don’t end up ignored in overloaded inboxes, it’s essential to adopt precise and effective marketing strategies. Here are some practical tips for improving the relevance and effectiveness of your email campaigns:
- In-depth personalization: Use the data collected on your customers to personalize messages according to their preferences and past behavior. For example, if some customers have regularly clicked on products in a specific category, your next email message could feature similar products or offers in that same category.
- Mobile optimization: Make sure your emails are readable and attractive on smartphones and tablets, where a large proportion of users consult their emails. This means using a design that automatically adapts to the screen size.
- Enriching content: Provide content that really brings value to your recipients. This could be practical advice, news about your products, or exclusive offers based on their interests.
- A/B Testing: Test different versions of your emails to determine which elements perform best. You could modify the subject lines, the design, or the call to action to see which modifications result in the best performance.
- Intelligent automation: Set up automated emails that are triggered by user actions, such as a welcome email following registration or an abandoned cart reminder. This keeps engagement with your contacts relevant and timely.
- Tracking and analysis: Regularly measure the open, click and conversion rates of your campaigns. Analyze these rates to understand what’s working and what needs fine-tuning, and use these insights to refine your future marketing strategies.
By integrating these methods into your emailing strategy, you’ll increase the chances that your emails will not only reach their recipients, but also engage them in a meaningful way. However, today this may not be enough, depending on your sector. That’s why many MirrorProfiles customers run cross-channel campaigns (Email + Linkedin). They use Linkedin to follow up with their prospects to let them know they’ve tried to reach them via email or/and vice versa. This technique is effective because it shows your prospect that you’re genuinely interested in him.
Prospect on Linkedin for better results
Using LinkedIn for B2B prospecting is a powerful and effective method, and integrating MirrorProfiles accounts can greatly enhance this marketing strategy.
As LinkedIn is a social network, it offers more opportunities for interaction. Thanks to MirrorProfiles, companies have professional LinkedIn accounts that can be managed by their marketing and sales teams.
Thanks to MirrorProfiles, companies have professional Linkedin accounts that can be managed by their marketing and sales teams:
- With several Linkedin accounts, you have access to a greater volume of scraping and, above all, data enrichment. In fact, 1 Linkedin profile can visit (and therefore collect data from) around 20 to 30 Linkedin profiles a day. With a dozen profiles, a whole file of prospects can be enriched. With all this data, you can personalize your Linkedin prospecting messages to maximize their impact.
- Overcome limitations on connection requests with MirrorProfiles accounts. Today, your sales rep (or recruiter) uses his or her own personal Linkedin account to prospect. This only represents between 100 and 120 new contacts per week. Mathematically, if you multiply the number of Linkedin accounts your sales rep can have, then you multiply the number of people he or she can contact per week.
Having several Linkedin accounts is today’s major new prospecting hack, just as it was when tools made it easy to multiply the number of email addresses for your sales reps, so you can send more emails without getting blacklisted. It was Instantly in particular that democratized this practice, which is now valid on many emailing tools. MirrorProfiles is the Linkedin equivalent of this tool.
In conclusion, emailing, once an indisputable pillar of communication and prospecting, is now at a decisive turning point. Inbox saturation, changing data protection regulations, the emergence of new communication technologies and platforms, and the development of more sophisticated spam filters have all contributed to a decline in the effectiveness of email marketing.
However, this is not necessarily the end of emailing. By adopting precise and effective marketing strategies, such as in-depth personalization, mobile optimization, offering enriching content, A/B testing, intelligent automation, and regular tracking and analysis, companies can still make the most of this tool.
What’s more, integrating e-mail messages into a multi-channel communication strategy, particularly with LinkedIn, can bring significant results. The use of multiple LinkedIn accounts, thanks to tools such as MirrorProfiles, gives access to greater scrapping volumes, overcoming limitations in connection requests, and personalizing prospecting messages.
So emailing, while facing challenges, can still reinvent itself and remain relevant in the arsenal of modern marketers, especially when these mails are integrated into a broader, more diversified communications strategy.
