E-mail marketing is one of the biggest marketing channels for many organizations, but meanwhile, the revenues coming from e-mail marketing channels is depreciating year on year for the business who are completely relying on email marketing for the following reasons:

• The strict GDPR (General Data Protection Laws) or E-mail marketing spam laws in some of the countries
• People/Users awareness about the data privacy
• With the developed spam filters blocking the emails and servers through which emails are delivered
• Users preferring many other channels to find their products or services
• With the increased emails from multiple domains they are all been ignored most of the times by the users
• SMS and What’s app must also be impacting e-mail importance for the users, as many times they would receive the information through SMS or What’s app and would not prefer and hence the limited use of e-mails for checking the promotional content.

Then, what’s the best alternative to the email marketing when e-mail marketing is no more working for your business?

Before we get into the email marketing channel alternatives lets brainstorm on the following,

Why E-mail Marketing

• Mainly e-mail marketing was one of the easiest ways for businesses with the e-mail database availability.
• Businesses prefer e-mail marketing if they have huge and well-categorized databases
• And, also the technology restrictions were very limited in the past and hence the cost of e-mail marketing was small compared to other channels.

Note: But in the recent times the e-mail marketing is no cheaper with the kind of tools to be used and with the poor quality data.

When do businesses prefer e-mail marketing

E-mail marketing is a very old practice since few decades and hence many businesses must be still using this channel even though when they have already adapted to other channels

“Soon some of the categories of businesses would completely stop with E-mail marketing, as e-mail marketing is taking lots of time to them and many times there is no return on the investment (ROI) or has become difficult to measure the returns.

For some of the categories, e-mail marketing must be working fine either due to their product/service type or location

The kind of benefits from e-mail marketing (In the past, in recent times its very limited)

E-mail marketing has many benefits and is all been taken by the new marketing channels such as search engines, and many other platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora, and many content portals.

However here are some of the benefits of the E-mail Marketing specific to E-mail marketing

• Low cost
• Reach specific or targeted audience directly
• Easy to get started
• Immediate results
• No auction bidding
• Not to be paid to any platforms except for the servers and tools
• One-time cost or one-time investment
• Can be reached a very large number of target audiences with the availability of data

Coming back to the best alternatives of E-mail marketing,

All your questions such as,

• What replaces email marketing
• Best marketing channels apart from e-mail marketing
• Without E-mail marketing
• What’s going to replace e-mail marketing
• More marketing ideas for the business

Are answered below,

There are many advanced marketing channels available today and are been in wide use already by many companies who are looking for aggressive growth in their revenues through digital marketing.

The marketing opportunities are huge with the advancement in the internet technologies and for better understanding, we can split it into two categories such as,

• Marketing with E-mail data
• Marketing Without e-mail data

Marketing with the availability of E-mail Data

G-mail Ad’s:

• G-mail campaigns can be executed by signing to Google AdWords tool, it is very simple to execute, you can either create the audience list or upload the list of Gmail ids.
• The Google tools show ad’s in the user’s inbox with the mention of the ad on it
• The outcome of this Gmail ad’s is very much similar to the e-mail marketing with some differences in execution,
• Gmail ads allow you to target the users by device type, region, gender, age, browsing history, competitor page liked profiles, lookalike audiences by uploading e-mail ids and more.
• Text and Image ads can be served

Facebook Ad’s

• Facebook ads are very much similar to G-mail ad’s and the only difference here is the ads are shown on the Facebook wall, messenger inbox or on Instagram with an option to control the visibility.
• Facebook ads are easy to start and you just need to have a Facebook account for it and you have to register for ad’s account for your business page and then update the payment mode to start with the ad’s
• Here the audience lists can be created and alternatively the e-mail ids can be uploaded so that the ads can be shown only to those users.
• Facebook allows you to target the users by device type, region, gender, age, browsing history, competitor page liked profiles, lookalike audiences by uploading e-mail ids and more.
• Text, Image and video ad’s can be served

LinkedIn Ad’s

• LinkedIn ads are shown only on the LinkedIn feed or wall
• LinkedIn ads can be started by registering for the LinkedIn ads from the business page
• LinkedIn targeting is same as the above targeting methods where you will be able to target by the designation/role, demographics, region, and more
• Text, Image and Video ad’s can be served

YouTube Ad’s

• Needs to signup for Google AdWords
• Ad’s will be served at the start of the video, below the video as a text or the bumper ad’s or unescapable ads
• Content Text and video
• Targeting is same as the above channels

Ad’s on Quora

• Ad’s will be served on Quora Q&A pages based on the targeting preferences such as content preferences, show ad’s on pages related to your topic
• Ad’s can be served by creating the audience list or by uploading the email id’s

Yahoo Ad’s

• Ad’s those can run by creating audience lists or by uploading the yahoo e-mail id’s
• Everything else remains the same as G-mail ad’s
• Yahoo Gemini is the tool to be used to run the ad’s

Marketing Without e-mail data

Search Engine Optimization:

Search engine optimization is very effective especially if your business is being searched on Google by your relevant audiences

eg: Somebody is trying to find a Digital marketing trainer and they prefer to search in on Google as follows,

Image,

The best part is there are few thousands of people searching on Google or any other search engine to find the Digital marketing trainers.

For your business to be available on top of the Google listing your website needs optimization from all the perspectives, here we call it as the user and SEO perspective.

If you are looking for an expert to optimize your website get in touch with us

Manjunath Kendra’s expertise is in search engine optimization and has helped many top Indian and non-Indian brands to rank on top of Google SERP.

“Google is not the only search engine used, there are many search engines but Google is the most used search engine across the globe except China and Russia, which have their own search engines like Baidu and Yandex respectively.

The next biggest search engine used in US after Google is “Bing”

Search engine Marketing

Search engine marketing is also referred to as Google AdWords or paid marketing or Pay per click or SEM.

This is similar to SEO, but then the only difference is instead of optimizing the website to rank up on top of SERP business owners take part in the auction to place their website on the top.

This is mostly preferred if the website is not ranking on top on search engines and if the business owners prefer to rank up still before the organic performance of the website picks up.

Alternatively, to acquire more customers or to have a presence across business consider search engine marketing.

Ad’s on ad network/Display Marketing

If you think your audiences are spending their time on the internet lets say news portal or any other portal you can always consider this opportunity and promote your products/services to the target audience groups.

Almost all the ad networks and social media platforms all various kinds of targeting and the targeting includes,

• Age groups
• Gender
• Location
• Designations
• Browsing histories
• Audience interest categories
• Audience preferences
• Audience profile since their professional start
• Device type

And many more, the set of targeting options differ from platform to platform and no single platform will have all kinds of targeting. But anyways still certain combinations make the platform most powerful to reach the right audience groups.

Content Marketing

Achieving the goals through the content that your audience groups are consuming or interested in is content marketing. You can develop lots of content that your audience groups are looking for, for example: best digital marketing consultants in India, with regard to such queries the business owner or the digital marketing consultants, can develop a content such as best “The most successful digital marketing consultants of the year”, in this article there can be list of digital marketers mention and one who goes through this would approach the consultant whom so ever he is comfortable or gauges to be as the best.

Hence the goal is achieved through content.

Conclusion:

• E-mail marketing was a great channel long back and currently its dead and taken over by many other channels such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google, Quora, Yahoo and many more.
• E-mail marketing has many limitations and challenges especially when data is illegal, when emails sent are illegal, advanced spam filter and many more.
• “E-mail marketing is dead and if you are still relying on it you are losing huge opportunities if you have a hack in handling this channel you can always do it but mean don’t miss out on the opportunities of other great channels with highest conversion rates and low cost per acquisitions.

Ramya Teja

Digital Marketing Expert, consultant, Mentor and
Director of KandraDigital Marketing
Solutions Pvt Ltd.