Is Email Marketing Saturated?

I was recently chatting with a friend who works for an on-demand Content Management provider. Currently they do no email marketing whatsoever, which I found difficult to believe. Of course I offered to offer some help in getting them started, but her response to that was shocking. She replied: "but isn't email kind of a saturated channel?". This made me realize that there are quite possibly a number of marketers out there who don't understand the incredible return that email marketing provides!

I think it's pretty clear why there may be the misconception about email. I believe it's simply that the unscrupulous few [a.k.a. spammers] are spoiling it for the rest of us well meaning marketers. They are frustrated with the tens and hundreds of spam messages filtering into their inbox each day, and as a result are quick to mentally associate any promotional message with the Viagra offers and cheap University diplomas.

They fail to realize however, that the most effective, most personalized, and most relevant means of communication available to any business is none other than the 'marketing', or 'promotional' email. Think about it: rather than receive a 20-page flyer from your favourite retailer - of which you skip 17 pages - wouldn't it be most beneficial for you as the consumer to just receive the offers that you're interested in?

And that's the power of email marketing. With proper analytics and an opt-in strategy in place, businesses can build detailed profiles about each unique customer. Predictive analytics can be applied, delivering not only the products/services you've shown interest in, but also what you're likely to be interested in. Then with proper planning and execution, you can receive a very personalized email, and content will be relevant, timely and useful to you.

Really, the onus is on ethical marketers to differentiate themselves from the mindless spammers out there. It's up to us to continue to improve our email marketing strategy, to get our one email past the spam filters, into inboxes, intriguing the user to open the email, and then finally providing enough value that they're convinced to click-through and convert.

So no, email marketing is not even close to saturated. Spamming is. So don't think about renting lists or hitting everyone in your database. Think about building an opt-in strategy. Think about building personas and unique customer profiles. Think about delivering the right message to the right person at the right time. That is the virtually untapped power of email marketing, use it wisely!