Email: Still Viable?

The short answer is yes. But for those online marketers still utilizing the medium as their main source of online revenue, the answer isn’t as clear.

by Kristina Knight

Emailing advertisements, links to programs or recruiting through the medium gets tougher every day. More and more emails are directed straight to the spam and junk folders. By upping your email “credit” rating you can increase deliverability, but what about those potential customers who completely unsubscribe from the loop because of the influx of messages?

For this reason, many companies are beginning to steer away from email in favor of RSS feeds, blogs, plogs and other resources. But are they missing out? Potentially yes because with KPIs in place companies can offset the problems with email marketing.

Companies of all sizes need strategies in place to track performance. Wikipedia describes KPI (key performance indicators) as financial and non-financial metrics used to quantify objectives to reflect the strategic performance of an organization. Basically, this means if you are operating an email campaign, you need to have a strategy in place that will track what is happening performance-wise and prescribe a course of action.

David Baker says in his blog that with KPIs in place personal biases toward email marketing don’t enter into the corporate discussions because there is a strategy in place to overcome obstacles.

So, before you dropkick email marketing off your field, develop your own KPI and steer back to email as a viable means of advertising.