5 Biggest Email Marketing Myths that Hold Businesses Back

email marketing mythsWith marketing littered with social prospecting, content marketing and email automation, it’s important to remember that traditional online methods should still be used now more than ever.

Email marketing, considered a dead medium filled with pushy salesmen and spam, is still a perfect, highly-targeted way of engaging with your customers.

Here, we’ve put together the 5 biggest email marketing myths and why you should continue to push time and money into the platform for use in your campaigns.

Myth #1. Email Marketing = SPAM

Gone are the days when email marketing used to mean hundreds of daily unsolicited messages flooding your inbox! Thankfully, framework and laws have been put in place to detract spam and keep you happy online.

Email marketing not becoming spam is down to two fantastic things:

  1. Smarter email clients
  2. Better targeted emails

Email clients such as Gmail, have sophisticated algorithms that protect you from these nasty spam emails and can alleviate the problematic senders too. As if this isn’t good enough, Gmail can also sort your ‘spam-type’ emails into tabs, making messages such as promotional material and social notifications more user-friendly instead of throwing them into a messy spam folder.

Gmail spam filter tabs

The other reason we are blessed in this golden age of email marketing is thanks to targeted email campaigns. No, I’m not talking about a generic email from John Smith that reads “Hi, FIRSTNAME”…I’m talking about an email following up with you the day after downloading an eBook. These highly targeted emails involve more time on a business’ behalf investing their skills into nurturing you as a customer, but ultimately, you’re much more likely to open an email that reads “Thanks for downloading our 2016 Marketing Report yesterday” than “FREE Something-You-Never-Requested”.

Targeting also revolves around customers being put into buyer personas so a business can segment you into a subset to nurture you along their customer journey and the buying process. This may sound like a bad thing as the business ultimately is using you for its own ends, but it’s actually “win win” because they’re solving specific problems you experience in your everyday life – whether at work or home.

Myth #2. No one reads email

The most common answer for this myth can be summed up with one GIF: Ain’t Nobody Got Time for That!

In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Millions of emails are opened each day across the globe. Numbers of emails read are actually increasing each year (when targeted, not just mass-marketed email campaigns), and we can see now more than ever people are reading their emails outside of work, as well as more throughout the working week too.

Other marketers will swear that email will die due to the fact nobody engages with it like they used to (only using it for the collection of information in one place), and for those people I say email is here to stay.

Myth #3. Email Marketing is too “Old School”

Some people would say “There’s no school like the old school” and in this case, they’d be right! The general consensus nowadays is that Gen Y and younger consume their news and the information they care about through alternatives to email such as social media and websites.

While this may be true, the fact remains that email still should be used in your campaigns. Most successful inbound marketing campaigns that are targeted through use of blog posts benefit greatly from emails sent out periodically that detail the information in one succinct message.

Outside a working environment, Gen Y use emails to receive notifications in one place rather than logging in to several websites (source: myself, being a 22-year-old Gen Y writing this!) as they consume more information on a faster rate than any before it.

Myth #4. Email is dying

Whoever said this was clearly too lazy to put any effort into email marketing…email marketing myths

When there’s 196 billion emails being sent every day with 91% of all consumers on all lists checking their email accounts daily, how can this be considered ‘dying’? The best thing about email marketing is that you can offer highly personal, highly targeted information on a channel that you own!

Email will never die. ‘Nuff said.

Myth #5. “FREE” is too good to be true

Remember when you used to receive emails that made you extreme promises in absurd timeframes? When “FREE Download: How to become a millionaire in 10 days!” generally meant spam? Or a Nigerian prince wanted to give you free money because he had too much?

Thankfully, people have evolved with the times and have become more email-savvy. However, some of us still have the ingrained adage of “if it’s too-good-to-be-true, it probably is”.NFL shop free shipping email

Nowadays, if you’re receiving an email from a trusted source, you can usually be sure it isn’t spam In Australia we’ve got strict anti-spam laws that help users stay safe online. I received an email the other day from the NFL Shop offering me free shipping to Australia, which was amazing.

While some ‘FREE’ subject lines indicate something that we may perceive as genuine (such as ‘Free Shipping’) it’s important to know that if an email from a known sender is offering you something free that they’re known for (i.e. “Free Hoyts Movie Ticket”), it generally means you’re going to have a great day!

Final Word on Email Marketing Myths

These are our top 5 email marketing myths – that are obviously now busted! Have any questions or comments? Let us know in the comment section below.

CLCK Team