If Email Use Is Supposedly in Decline, Why Keep Doing Email Marketing?

In a recent post, we talked a bit about concerns that the consumer attention span may be drifting away from email in favor of other communication channels, particularly social media. Some people are very alarmist about the trend, but as we pointed out, while email use is in decline for certain demographic segments, it's actually increasing among others:

The Four Things Killing Email Marketing - And What You Can Do To Rescue It!

1. One-size-fits-all, or one-message-fits-all, messaging is boring the heck out of consumers

Most marketers who do email marketing use a simple “blast” strategy. Actually, calling it a “strategy” is overstating things, because the blast approach is anything but strategic. It’s all about expedience: doing the minimum amount of work needed to just get an email message out to all customers (or potential customers) on a schedule (daily, weekly, whatever).

Unfortunately, in our age of hyper-personalized media, consumers quickly tune out one-message-fits-all email blasts. A lot of times consumers can’t even be bothered to unsubscribe; they’ll simply trash your email messages without opening them.