Email Marketing: Does it still work like it did in 1978?

05/04/19 • 7 min

The Digital Marketing Podcast with Mandar Marathe

As per State of Inbound Report published by HubSpot, 30% Sales reps prefer Email as a channel to connect with a prospect. The same report also states that 32% of C level executives (CEO, CMOs) prefer to communicate over email. This means that email marketing does work in 2019.

So which email clients are most used: Gmail 28%, Apple iPhone 28%, Outlook 9%

Gmail Promotions tab: What impact did it have on marketers?

To everyone’s surprise, the new Gmail categorization did not negatively impact marketers. As a matter of fact, the Promotions tab is the second most adopted tab (right behind Social), with a 60 percent adoption rate as per a study conducted by ReturnPath. Almost half of Gmail users (45.1 percent to be exact) check their Promotions tab at least once a day.

Email Trivia

Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email 48 years ago.

Billed as the 'Father of Spam' Gary Thuerk, a Marketing Manager at Digital Equipment Corp started the ball rolling for commercial email by sending the first mass emailing. In 1978, Thuerk sent an email promoting DEC machines to 400 users via Arpanet. What would have then been a complete novelty for recipients resulted in $13 million worth of sales for DEC machines

When Hotmail launched as the first free web based email service in 1996 it gave marketers a whole new way to reach customers. I remember my email id on hotmail was [email protected] - which means I got an account in 2001. I got my first gmail account in 2004 and the first email i sent out was to a Vineet, who is a very close friend from my engineering days. The email which i sent on 4th September, 2004 read "How r u just tryin the gmail concept".

So how do you get your email marketing to work?

Collect emails the right way - Use double opt in for subscriptions
Segment your email list
Prune your list every quarter
Send good emails. Try to be as relevant and contextual as possible.

So which email clients are most used: Gmail 28%, Apple iPhone 28%, Outlook 9%

Gmail Promotions tab: What impact did it have on marketers?

Email Trivia

Ray Tomlinson sent the first ever email 48 years ago.

So how do you get your email marketing to work?

Collect emails the right way - Use double opt in for subscriptions
Segment your email list
Prune your list every quarter
Send good emails. Try to be as relevant and contextual as possible.

Previous Episode

Websites : How I built my first website & why you should too

Having a responsive, fast loading, intuitive and functional website is critical to achieving success with digital marketing. In this episode, I talk about the first website I designed as a 14 year old teen. I also talk about WordPress as a platform for building your website.

Next Episode

How to uncover your competitors Facebook Ads strategy

Do you want to know which Ads your competitor is running on Facebook? There are two ways in which you could do this:

1. Head over to facebook.com/ads/library and type in the name of the brand that you want to analyse. You can get which ads your competitors are running, whether they are active or inactive, how much have they spent on Facebook Ads in the last 3 months and in the past week and also get a segmentation based on Ads running for a particular geography (country).

2. You could simply go to the brand page. For e.g. facebook.com/flipkart and click on the "Info & Ads" tab in the left hand side menu. Again, you will be able to see the Ads that Flipkart is running.

Try to analyse the creative, copy and regional targeting done by your competitors and use some of the key takeaways to better your Facebook Ads. Over to you!