E-mail’s Still King
(Direct) Marketers who think they should be focusing on RSS and blogs at the expense of e-mail should think again.
A recent study by online marketing services provider Bluestreak reports that consumers who embrace emerging communications technologies — such as RSS, podcasts, text messaging, and blogs — still say e-mail is the digital tool they consider most necessary to their daily lives.
And e-mail remains a critical marketing channel for reaching early adopters. Thirty-one percent of those surveyed who use e-mail at least once a day said they open permission-based marketinge-mail 91%-00% of the time. Another 41% said they open these e-mails 61%-90% of the time.
“The message we want to get across is that e-mail is still king, and anyone who thinks that things like RSS or blogs are somehow marginalizing e-mail is way off,” says Leah Holzman, Bluestreak’s director of marketing.
For example, after opening a permission-based e-mail, 83% of respondents said they’ve clicked through to the Website; 69% made an online purchase; and 56% bought an item offline.
And though permission-based e-mail is a key marketing tool, consumers polled indicated that advertising generally is an acceptable price to pay for good content on all media except textmessaging. Seventy percent said they’d continue visiting a blog they know is sponsored, and66% would keep reading a sponsored message board.
A majority believe the number of ads on blogs, message boards, and podcasts — 55%, 55% ,and 61%, respectively — is appropriate. Most who recalled seeing those ads claimed they didn’t have negative feelings about the advertisers. But 77% said there’s too much advertising in text messaging, and 80% reported negative feelings toward advertisers in that medium.
The survey of 1,000 consumers from e-Rewards’ panel of 1.5 million households was conducted for Bluestreak by ROI Research
