[Common Question] Why You Should Still Do Email Marketing [A Legacy Tool]

From ACIDHOUSE, INC., this is Tetsuya Ashida.

I sometimes get questions like this from small business owners who have websites.

There's LINE@, Facebook Messenger, social media, and all sorts of things, but I heard it's better to send emails to customers.

But there are so many emails that people have stopped reading them — is it really worth doing?

This time I'll answer this kind of question.

Email is actually still effective

Email is a fairly classic tool in the world of the internet, but it is still one of the tools that makes it easiest to get conversions (applications and inquiries).

These are its main advantages.

Let me dig into each one.

An overwhelming number of users

On top of being a legacy tool, email registration is still required to use almost every web service.

There are such things as "throwaway addresses," but apart from people in IT jobs or geeks, not many users juggle that many email addresses.

In other words, its user base is overwhelmingly large and reasonably active.

A low barrier to sending

More and more email is now read on smartphones, but it is rare for people to set up notifications for when an email arrives.

Messaging apps (LINE@, Messenger, etc.), by contrast, are characterized by notifications pushing messages to the front. This raises the bar on a message's content, length, timing, frequency, and so on.

To use an analogy, email is like mail arriving at your house, while a messaging app is like someone ringing your doorbell.

If someone rings your doorbell and you open the door to a long-winded, pushy salesperson selling something you don't want...

you'd want to block them right away, wouldn't you?

Given that marketing measures are a cycle of testing and improvement, it is important to try a large number of variations.

You can't send blindly while ignoring users, but not having to be as careful about what and when you send as with messaging apps is a big advantage of email.

Ease of expression

With email, you don't have to be strict about minimizing the number of characters.

With messaging apps, being concise above all is what matters.
If you use them every day you'll know: when you're sent a long text, you don't feel like reading it.

It's also nice that it can be sent as a "mini LP (landing page)," as HTML email does.

In messaging apps, images and videos come as separate messages, so they can feel limiting when you're trying to make a persuasive pitch.

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Not dependent on a platform's terms of use

Messaging apps are provided by for-profit corporations.

To use them you must agree to the terms set by those corporations, which means you entrust the operating policy, though not all of it, to a for-profit corporation.

Beyond revisions to pricing and limits on the number of messages sent, in the extreme, if commercial use were banned you would effectively be unable to use it.

Of course, email also has rules: the Act on Regulation of Transmission of Specified Electronic Mail.

And it is true that using any platform always comes with risk, but you need to weigh whether the benefits outweigh what you accept under the terms of use.

Step emails

You can expect the following effects from email:

Step emails fall into the latter.

Dan Kennedy, an American authority on DRM (direct response marketing), preaches placing the greatest importance on the relationship with customers, and step emails are one of the tools best suited to that.

*In fact, Dan Kennedy says that "newsletters, direct mail, and email are the three sacred treasures — the media you especially want to make use of".

Today's world is overflowing with information and things, and most of the newsletters arriving in your mailbox are nothing but "buy now" emails.

Amid all that, what catches customers' eyes is "products and services of big companies" and "low prices."

Small businesses must not set foot in that game.

That is where DRM proves effective, and building relationships with customers — and using step emails for that — is what matters.

What will happen to email from here?

Even as times change, there is no doubt that it will remain going forward.

However, ordinary text emails will probably become harder to get read.
That's because senders and information are saturated, and users are shifting to video and audio.

Also, because the variety and traffic of messaging apps and social media have grown too large, there is a movement for short messages to return to SMS based on phone numbers.

I expect email to be used in combination with other channels along a flow like this.