Email Marketing in the Age of Blindness

It’s been coming for awhile now. Direct mail had its hay-day, but is now lying at the bottom of the waste bin. Tele-marketers were really successful while people still considered them human. Billboards worked great until people were too busy with their iPods, cell phones, and XM Radio to pay attention. Newspaper advertising worked great back when people still read. Websites worked until there were hundreds of millions of them. And now in a never-ending tidal wave of spam, email marketing too is waning as a successful way to get the word out.

So does anything still work? The simple answer is “yes” -but marketing, like it used to be, is hard work again. Every so often a new media pops up, and there is a brief honeymoon period of novelty. People are receptive because they haven’t yet grown mistrustful or bored with it.

Marketing today has to be even more creative, and even more truthful for it to resonate. It’s no longer as simple as dividing your budget between the media options, and casting your hopes to the wind. You may as well throw your money out the window…

As a business, you have to seriously analyze your service, or product. You have to know your audience, and be able to pull at their heart strings. We’re a consumer society, and a knowledgeable consumer cuts very little slack for sloppy service, or faulty products.

Marketing is back to what is used to be, back to what it always should have been. The simple hard work of telling a story, telling it well, making people believe it, and most of all believing it yourself…

Whether you choose billboards, TV, web, mail, or email, don’t expect easy answers. Yes, marketing campaigns scale. Yes a traffic count, and a demographic study still matter. But today nothing matters more than your message. That one true nugget that you’re ready to shout at the top of your lungs, and make people believe it.