I do love it how people with a vested interest bend figures to suit themselves ... of course these people think that email marketing works, they sell email marketing.  It puts food on their table.  But let's take this article through a fact check.

The fact that the number of emails being sent is increasing is not a reason to rejoice that email marketing is working.  The number of emails sent increases because we are all ignoring the ones being sent, so people send, more ... and .. more .... and more.

How many times have you got an email, only for 2 seconds later they send another email saying are you ignoring my emails.  Of course I am.

Saying that the number of emails increasing is a justification for email marketing is like saying we have increased the number of cold calls from 100 a day to 150, which means cold calling is work.  The facts are simple, it's not working, you are having to do more to get the result you used to get. 

Looking at my email inbox is not a justification to use email marketing.  Of course I look at my email inbox, it's where the legacy people are.  I no longer email anybody through my personal life, everything is on social.  Same with my mother who is 82.  She complains about the "old people" who still insist on using email.

Most of my business now takes place on social.  We use Slack, as do IBM and Oracle.  With big corporations moving to social, email is really something from the 1980s.

Really?  People check email, the first thing they do in the day.  This is rubbish. 

And finally, you cannot compare email and social media.

Most posts from companies on social media are crap and are ignored.  Most stuff on social media is corporate spam, so I am not surprised that these figures show social media engagement is low.

Interruption marketing (cold calling, advertising and email) is dying, your clients are on social media.  The problem is that marketers still think they can treat social media as a form of interrupt and broadcast. 

Social media is about permission marketing, relationships, inspiration, education.  Completely different.

So there you have it, email marketing shows you have run out of ideas.  It shows you don't understand modern marketing techniques and you are on a road to nowhere.

Every process and every interaction you have with a customer (and an employee) now in the internet empowered world will either create trust or destroy it.

Every interaction you have in the sales, marketing, human resources process will create or destroy trust.

In the digital economy the customer has the right to opt-in as they do the right to opt-out.

This is the converse of interruption.  Since the 1930 people have interrupted you.  Advertising, cold calling, unsolicited emails all are untrustworthy ... they interrupt us and they piss us off.

Anybody that is running an interruption sales and marketing program is pushing customers, prospects and employees away.

Social media has changed society and its changed business. 

Just think, the Arab spring, the ALS Ice Bucket challenge and turn on the TV News and it will be about who has tweeted. You may not like the freedoms that social media gives us in society, but the genie is out of the bottle.

In business, social has transformed the way we work. We are able to look people up before we meet them and make judgements about what you are like. Will it be an insightful meeting or will it be dull and I should I just cancel it at the last moment?

In the last 5 years most businesses, have approached social media from a tactical point of view. Each department, Sales, Human Resources (HR), Customer Experience (CX), Marketing etc have had their own siloed team and the order of the day has been to tactically post, chasing likes and followers.  

But something has changed. All the world is on social media. The research from Hootsuite and We are Social Media https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2019-q4-global-digital-statshot shows there are 3.75 Billion people in the world active on social media. From a B2B Enterprise prospective, that is pretty much everybody you are going to need to sell to. 

Research by Accenture shows that we are spending 6.4 hours a day on the internet, which if we take out the time we are asleep, we are now spending half our lives on the internet.

In the last 5 years, Social media has grown up from a tactical play thing to a global phenomenon. That growth means that as well as changing society globally, it’s changed commerce and business leaders like us are waking up and not viewing social media tactically, but, strategically.  

In fact, Social Media has become a boardroom issue.

As we start a new decade, the actions we take in the next few years will govern if we are going to remain relevant to this social media empowered customer. Leadership is about understanding the opportunity and leading with it within our organisation. What got us here, won’t get us there and this will require your business to change. Change in our people, change in our process and change in our leadership.

What will that mean for our business? While social transformation in sales, often called social selling or digital selling, often grabs the headlines, Social impacts across the whole of the enterprise. Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Human Resources. Empowering, the employees to communicate internally and externally, as well as providing a business case to increase revenue and reduce costs.  This is about embedding (internal and external) trust right across the business.

While, 2030 seems a long way away, our businesses will only survive if we connect with our prospects, clients, employees, future employees and suppliers. And they are all on, and are active on, social media. It’s time to grasp the social media thistle. 

Love to hear your thoughts on this!