Laughed off and brushed off

Long before corporate communications through emails became a marketing trend, I remember it was something I suggested to my very first employers. Sadly, the idea of sending useful and relevant e-newsletters was laughed off and brushed off. I was told instead, to keep doing what I was doing – sending sales pamphlets via snail mail day-in day-out to unqualified leads.

Fast-forward 17 years later, the ‘content-based’ email marketing scene is heavily saturated after becoming one of the most popular ways to engage customers in the naughts. 

Believe in yourself until someone else will

Years after this incident, when I was working with another private company as their lead marketer, the forward-thinking business owner said, ‘I hired you because you are the expert at what you do. I’m happy for you to make that decision’. ‘Wow… what a difference an employers mindset can make,’ I thought. Needless to say, this was where I experienced the most growth as a marketer. Sure not every marketing effort was a bullseye, but learning from the results is a crucial part of a marketer’s role and that can’t be done without some level of experimentation or as we like to call it A/B testing.

Keep your eye on the future

I still maintain that content is king, especially dynamic content, automatically personalised to the preferences of a prospective customer (hopefully tracked in your database), but we are definitely at crossroads in terms of whether emails are still an effective means of communication with potential customers. Things are now skewed towards social media, where people already ‘follow’ updates for topics that interest them.

What is the next big breakthrough in the marketing world?

Point is, shouldn’t just follow trends, but identify them early on and pioneer the way forward for the best way to communicate with our target audience. What do you think is the next big thing in the digital marketing world?