Some sobering statistics have emerged from the Relemail Email Privacy Survey conducted in November 2004. In other words, while it may be too early to declare the demise of email marketing, as management consultants have been pointing out for over an year now, the days are definitely numbered. Let us review some of the key findings of the study:
- 83% of users have avoided subscribing to an email newsletter because they weren't sure they could trust the publisher
- 78% do not always believe companies' own email privacy statements
- 87% believe they have received spam from an organization that collected, and then sold, their email address
- 96% say email privacy is important to them 80% say they have tried to unsubscribe from an email newsletter and found that the unsubscribe did not work
So what is likely to replace email marketing?
This is a question that your current email marketing provider is unlikely to answer in a way that serves your best interest. On the other hand, you might actually receive misleading data from a company that has a vested interested in you continuing with your email marketing programs. There is no denying the fact that email receiving, opening, and clicking rates have been consistently dropping over the years.
There are other alternatives, of course, and the cheapest is real simple syndication (or RSS). If you have had an opt-in list of subscribers to your email list, there is nothing much to worry. Your members will simply switch to a new platform and they can do at their own pace. And those that may have been interested in your products/company but were skeptical about submitting their email address to a company that they could not trust, subscribing to your RSS feeds is the best alternative. The recent news that blogs have become the preferred content marketing medium shows that syndication is the next platform for marketing.
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