Coping with the Email Marketing Future: Principles + Practicalities

Author:

Mark Brownlow

Source:

I’m terrified.
 
And I’ve been terrified for 12 years, ever since I built my first website and sent my first marketing email.
 
Why?
Because out there on the Interweb are a heap of people working away to develop new tools and technologies and applications and algorithms and channels and content and devices and designs and software and sites and things we’ve never heard of yet.
 
Any one of which might be the one that turns an existing business, business model or online approach into an overnight anachronism.
 
You scared, too?
 
It’s not as bad as it seems (we’re still here) but the future is a place of both potential and pain. How do you move forward confidently in an era of constant change?
 
Email marketing, for example, has been hanging under its own Damocles Sword of change ever since someone realized that “email is dead” makes a superb headline. Adapt or die. We adapt, and email continues to flourish.
 
Yet the “new” email success models presented so well by vendors, blogs and other media leave many of us standing at the shop window like a Victorian orphan, wistfully imagining a world where we, too, could get our hands on all those wonderful toys.
 
So how do you do cope with change when you have limited time and/or funds?
 
I have my own blueprint for survival which I’d like to share with you.
 
Don’t panic and keep a sense of perspective
 
Few information sources are interested in the success of your business. They’re interested in the success of their own business. And the two are not always aligned.
 
Compare, for example, Google Trends data for Facebook and Twitter...