What would happen if next Monday a major component in your Content Marketing campaign disappeared and you couldn’t use it as easily ever again?
That May Happen – It May be Soon
Every year the average worker gets more and more emails each day. Most of these are marketing emails. Email frequency has increased from monthly to biweekly to weekly. More and more vendors are emailing us daily. On the last day of a sale, some send us several emails and a few seem to send these hourly.
The time an employee spends on emails daily is increasing. The latest studies indicate the average employee is spending between 2 and 4 hours every work day on email activity. There is nothing to indicate the amount of time won’t increase in the future.
How long can any company continue to tolerate every employee spending 25% or more of their work days on email related activity? How much does it cost the company?
The Breaking Point is Coming
The day may arrive when executives of every company have their IT people put blocks on their company systems to filter out unnecessary emails.
We saw this done with spam. Email service providers set up spam accounts to which emails believed to be part of mass mailings were automatically routed. IT people can do something similar and set up special internal accounts where emails believed not to be tied to a company’s business are routed.
Each employee would have to specify which emails coming in are business related. Unfortunately, this would be after the fact. Legitimate business emails would fail to be identified and never make it to the person to whom they are sent.
Every company would not set up these filters on their systems at the same time. So marketers would never know which emails were getting through to the recipients and which weren’t.
What Impact Would That Have on
Your Marketing Efforts?
How big a role does email contact play in your regular marketing or Content Marketing efforts? If email marketing is a major part of your marketing campaign the impact will be huge.
Let’s look at two different scenarios.
First – you’re at an industry conference. You meet 15 new prospects and ask if you can follow up with them. After the conference none of the 15 updates their systems to permit email messages from you to get through to them. You email each one the following week. They never get your messages and you don’t realize it. Your effort is wasted.
Second – you follow up by email with every new contact you make on Linkedin. You want to let them know more about you and find out if you might be able to help them. Your message doesn’t make it through their company’s filter. They never get what you sent. They haven’t any idea you tried to contact them.
If companies take steps to cut down on the time their employees spend on emails, you, as a marketer, can replace your email marketing in 2 ways.
The first is to contact your prospects and targets by direct mail. This is much slower and adds time to your marketing efforts.
The second is through phone calls. You have to make it through the gatekeeper or be content to leave a message for your prospects on their voice mail.
Neither of these options are as efficient or as good as email.
Hopefully, internal filters that prevent emails from getting through will not be put in place. Likewise, an easier way to contact and keep in touch with your prospects customers will develop. Otherwise, your marketing costs are going to rise. The impact on your marketing efforts can be disastrous.
