Why Email Marketing Will Hurt Your Business

I’d like to throw a little bit of contrarian logic at you. Right. Here we go.

First, everybody’s got a freekin’ electronic newsletter. There’s nothing that differentiates your business from Adam if it – also – emails a daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly newsletter.

Second, email is an increasingly filtered medium. Consumers are deluged by email. They – or their service provider – always set up an array of rules and filters that screen content. Plus, consumers are so programmed to just delete mail with the slightest skim. So, whatever you mass-mail has a mass-likelihood of being filtered before it hits either the end user’s mailbox or their extraordinarily shallow attention-span.

Third, when email is filtered, most filtering software logs the frequency of the mass emails and its origin. Plus, users can flag mail as annoying and spam in a moment of frustration, and these settings are shared with thousands of other users on commercial mail system. Then, those lists are shared with other servers and other users. In effect, your email server, your domain – your very name and brand! – becomes blacklisted over time.  This can effect just your regular email traffic in a negative way.

Fourth, email is becoming increasingly irrelevant. There’s a young generation on the rise that already looks at email as an “old person’s” medium, and it’s too asynchronous, too slow. Even gen-x and baby boomers are turning increasingly to social network updates to stay in-touch. Software innovations are also allowing us to share stuff online without using email.

So where does that put you? If you’re eagerly chasing after an e-mail marketing strategy, you’re:

1. Not differentiating your brand, ideas, or message in any way.

2. Making it easier to filter and delete your message – to ignore you.

3. Transforming your brand and web-presence into a blacklisted spammer.

4. You’re communicating your message in a way that’s quickly becoming obsolete.

Yeah, clearly: it’s time to re-think that direct email marketing strategy. Get started now.

R

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