Email Marketing to Millenials

Email Marketing to Millennials: Effective B2C Engagement

So the prevailing advice to reach the Millennial market goes something like this: “If you want to reach the Millennial market demographic, put all your marketing budget into mobile advertising and social media. That’s where it’s all happening.”

And if you follow the logical next step from a 2010 Pew Reach study that said:

Millennials outpace older Americans in virtually all types of internet and cell use. They are more likely to have their own social networking profiles, to connect to the internet wirelessly when away from home or work, and to post video of themselves online.

you would logically conclude that the never-ending proliferation of new social media channels, from Snapchat to Vine and who-knows-what, would make you think that using email to reach this target market would be a waste of time.  Nope. Guess again.

Email Marketing to Millennials

Email is the original social media, and studies have shown that when it comes to dealing with brands, Millennials prefer email for a variety of reasons.

Steve Dille at MarketingLand put together an extremely thorough analysis of all this that has some compelling takeaways for marketing types to chew on and digest.  As it turns out, the “always connected” generation has one constant among all the multitude of channels demanding their attention. Email.

One point Steve makes brilliantly is that while millennials use social channels like no one else, the key here is that they are social channels. When it comes to consumer-to-brand communication, there’s an entirely different dynamic in play. And for millennials, that means email. Which means fine tuning your email marketing machine so that it resonates with the millennial market.

Read Steve’s article here.  It’s well worth it.

 

Email Marketing works for Syracuse businesses.

Email Marketing Continues to Lead in Effectiveness

Almost every business we talk to has had really good results with email marketing.  And this is no surprise since almost every survey on the subject has found that business of every size and in almost every niche have found email marketing to be one of the most effective digital marketing strategies in their arsenal, delivering consistent ROI time and again.

In a recent Gigaom survey, 86% of marketers surveyed said that email marketing is the most reliable “workhorse” digital marketing tool for lead acquisition and re-engagement and conversion, and that email marketing continues to lead in effectiveness.  In second place was social media marketing and effective search engine optimization for organic search results.

Email Marketing leads in popularity

Email marketing has been consistently rated as the least difficult to do and one of the most effective. According to another study conducted by Forrester Research, 42% of adults don’t open email advertising and just delete it.  This is actually down from 44% in 2012 and 59% in 2010. There was also a strong sentiment that most email ads didn’t offer the recipient anything of interest (38%).

The takeaway here, of course, is that you need to be thoughtful and use email marketing wisely.  Email marketing is most effective when you specifically target your audience with a message that customized specifically to them.  This can be especially easy when you have a list of cold sales leads that you want to re-engage.  There is nothing like email (and direct mail) for lead re-engagement and conversion.