Glancing through the agenda for an upcoming Digital Marketing and Media Summit happening here in Melbourne, I noticed many interesting presentations with names like “Establishing Your Digital Community” and the “Social Media Revolution.” But there was nothing as far as I could tell about email marketing, and not much about online display advertising.
I don’t think the web professionals who will be speaking at the summit would say that Australian digital marketers are making the most of these channels. Here’s a real-world example that demonstrates this: about two months ago I subscribed to the email newsletters of all of Australia’s auto marketers. To date, most have never sent through a single message.
For a car company, a new email subscriber is a good sales lead. I’ve gone to their site. Shared personal information. Expressed interest in their products. It seems like a no-brainer for them to want to talk to me. Certainly if I’d visited a dealership, salespeople would be quick to follow up.
Why are so many Australian marketers not delivering when it comes to email? I think when they started their email programs, there was a lot of interest in this highly personal, low-cost channel. But some may be shifting their focus to channels that seem more shiny and new, even if there are lot more Australians with email accounts than TweetDecks.
The playing field for digital marketers keeps getting bigger. You need to go where your target audience is, experiment with new channels and keep learning. But you also need to keep building on what’s already working.
(To practice what I preach, I’m working on the next edition of the DTDigital enewsletter. We’ll be sending out a new edition soon. Use the subscription field in the footer.)