Email is out. What’s next?

Are you unsatisfied with the performance of your email marketing campaign?

Are you looking for what is next?

It is no secret over the past ten years the effectiveness and open rates of email marketing has dwindled.

Additionally, Gmail, MSN Mail and other major service providers are now filtering out promotion emails into separate folders which can be easily neglected by the recipient. This has made things considerably more difficult for email marketers.

In light of these developments, marketers are looking for new solutions.

 

What’s Next

Three emerging technologies are showing much potential for marketers and are currently being used with good results. They are:

• Web notifications
• Text messaging
• Live Chat

 

Web Notifications

By using a third party platform or custom programming (if you have a programmer) you can enable your website to have little pop up notifications which get your visitors’ attention and gives them some kind of enticing message. This is mostly used for special offers, discounts and free content. Because the notification ‘slides up’ on to the screen it is very effective in getting attention and clicks, especially if it has an enticing message.  This is a good way of making sure everyone who visits your site actually sees your offers.

 

Text Messaging

People are more likely to respond to text messages than emails. This is becoming more and more the case. Therefore marketers are moving into using text message for promotion.

There are even platforms on desktop computers which can be used to mass text-message contact lists.

Text Message marketing is new and the approach and etiquette are still being developed.

The most successful text message marketing would involve short personal messages, not mass bulk messages. People respond better to personalized communication, than bulk.

 

Live Chat

By adding some code to your website (from a third party platform) you will have the ability to chat with your web visitors if they open up the chat box and send you a message.

Live chat has been around for years on websites but has recently started gaining more popularity. There are even some platforms that offer this service for free.

The benefit of Live Chat is that it allows you to reach out to web visitors who otherwise may slip through the cracks and never contact you. But since you are just a click a way, it lowers the bar for reaching out to you (being more direct than a contact form) and it allows you to communicate to much more of your visitors.