Why Email Marketing is Still Key to the B2B Marketer's Skill Set
The under-21s are an entrepreneurial lot; revelling in their command of new technology, they blog, vlog and Snapchat, they roll their eyes at Facebook (it's where old people go online) and only check their emails if they are expecting something.
But they are keen to make money out of technology: they dream of bringing a killer app to market and riding into the top ten of the App Store.
How to achieve this? By blogging, vlogging and persuading other (more influential) bloggers and vloggers to write up the app.
Sending an email to a mailing list of ripe targets for the app is not on their to-do list.
Email marketing is targeted, fast and effective and it is falling out of favour with the new generation of marketers. Our 20somethings have grown up on mobiles and social media and cannot see that companies still require vast numbers of employees to spend time sat at their desk regularly checking and dealing with business emails. Sending an email gets your message in front of the decision maker in the company you are targeting.
Email marketing does require more planning than bashing out a blog; write the email, check the email for spelling, grammar and broken links, send it to some test email addresses to see if it contains a word that triggers filters and make sure that it does not lose its formatting on a mobile screen, test that your unsubscribe mechanism works. And finally choose who to send it to; use your existing client list, your list of leads and prospects or buy in a mailing list of executives in your target market.
If you are selling into businesses, email marketing remains the most direct and cost effective marketing tool in your arsenal. The 40something target for your killer business app is more likely to be reading his emails than reading this blog.