Despite all the buzz of social media and big data analytics, and social network analyses tools, a study sponsored by Lyris (a digital marketing solutions provider) and conducted by Economist Intelligence Unit identifies the following top three critical skills needed for marketer’s success:
- Ability to use data analysis to extract predictive findings from ‘Big Data’
- Understanding of best practices of email delivery
- Ability to generate insights about drivers of consumer behavior from multiple data sources
It is surprising that email marketing – a tool in the marketer’s
toolkit for 15-20 years – is in the top 3 critical skill gaps. Why?
- Email marketing works and small % improvement have an substantial impact. Revenue per thousand (RPM) for email marketing is 10X to 1000X the RPM for digital ads. Small % improvement to email performance beats order of magnitude improvements in performance of digital ads. Recent investments in start-ups such as MovableInk (supporting “live” or real-time personalized emails) substantiate its effectiveness and incremental opportunity hidden in improving email marketing.
- Prior relationship matters: Having a conversation with consumers who have expressed interest in what you have to offer or bought from you in the past is more valuable and effective than looking for a prospect. Even Facebook with the custom audience ad product permits marketers to leverage house email lists. You upload your house file of email addresses and Facebook "matches" the email addresses to their internal list of email addresses, and voila you have a custom audience segment on Facebook.
- Email marketing is cheap to execute: Compared to retargeting ads, email marketing is order of magnitude cheaper. Why look for a consumer with some prior relationship with you somewhere around the web when you can contact them directly via an email?
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