Less effective and more expensive: the circle of digital marketing life
How can your email campaigns get an 88% open rate and a 68% click-through rate? There’s only one way I know: build a time machine and send them in 2003.
A colleague at Croud cited those statistics to me from when he was running consumer marketing campaigns, thirteen years’ ago.
What can you expect now? Email marketing platform Mailchimp reckons you’re doing well if your open rate is 25% and you get a 3% click-through. The daily assault from email campaigns has destroyed their efficacy over time. Consumers are better tooled to filter email with spam filters and intelligent inboxes. Marketers have had to invest in technology to deliver campaigns and follow more stringent regulation.
While still a worthwhile tactic, email has become less effective and more expensive.
I first started practising paid search advertising back in 2002. Clicks for keyword traffic cost pennies on auction platforms like Overture and Espotting. The same year that Google moved AdWords to an auction driven cost-per-click model. (It used to be CPM, can you believe it?)
Fast-forward to the present day, and the prospect of penny clicks is laughable. A recent study cited “play live blackjack” as the most expensive keyword on Google UK at £148.51 per click. I don’t understand how anyone makes money at that price. Except Google of course. The market can stay irrational longer than a marketing director can stay employed.
The search marketplace has reduced to just two players, Google and Bing. The available ad space for paid search listings has shrunk. The shift to smartphones is part of this. Google’s initiatives like removing ads on the right hand rail also contribute. All this has driven up costs.
Search is an essential marketing weapon, but it has become less effective and more expensive.
I could cite more examples. Social media promised fan communities that could be marketed to, sorry, engaged with for free, in perpetuity. Facebook’s careful control of what appears in its users’ newsfeeds means once more, marketers have to open their wallets before they can open a conversation with their own fans.
I’d encourage any advertiser to invest budget into social, but it’s getting less effective and more expensive.
So what to make of this? It’s the circle of digital marketing life. New opportunities are discovered, but they are quickly saturated.
For marketers figuring out what to do with the next opportunity, it’s simple. Don’t debate. Don’t worry about being wrong. Don’t reminisce about being the way it used to be. Just try it. Now. And before it gets less effective and more expensive.
More about:
Lucy helps organizations leverage knowledge for in... View Tech Talk
TVSquared is the global leader in cross-platform T... View Tech Talk
Grata is a B2B search engine for discovering small... View Tech Talk
Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing ... Download Now
Data is the lifeblood of so many companies today. ... Download Now
This report documents the findings of a Fireside c... Download Now
The Merkle B2B 2023 Superpowers Index outlines wha... Download Now
Discover how embracing identity-driven media can pave the way for a brighter future in our ever-evolving global landscape… Read more
As voice technology extends beyond the home we explore its growing usage in public settings and the implications for brands and customer experiences… Read more
QQ is one of the biggest social media platforms in the world, but chances are that you’ve never come across it. What is QQ, and why is it so unknown outside of its home country of China, despite its huge size? And what do brands who are considering marketing on QQ need to know about it?… Read more
Streaming has become a staple of US media-viewing habits. Streaming video, however, still comes with a variety of pesky frustrations that viewers are ...
View resourceData is the lifeblood of so many companies today. You need more of it, all of which at higher quality, and all the meanwhile being compliant with data...
View resourceThis report documents the findings of a Fireside chat held by ClickZ in the first quarter of 2022. It provides expert insight on how companies can ret...
View resourceThe Merkle B2B 2023 Superpowers Index outlines what drives competitive advantage within the business culture and subcultures that are critical to succ...
View resource21% expected increase in current ABM budgets demonstrate it is now a mainstream B2B technology. Read More...
View articleChief Outsiders' CMO Adriana Lynch, looks at some of the key predictive tools and how they can be deployed to help your business. Read More...
View articleA recent article by Martech Advisor stated that ‘In 2017, organizations will realize that attribution is not the panacea to their measureme...
View articleThe consumers’ path to purchase has grown increasingly complex, with the vast majority of touchpoints occurring over multiple sessions and multiple ma...
View articleChina is a world leader when it comes to social commerce. Here, JD.com's Joey Bian outlines how cosmetic giant SK-II blended data from two of China's ...
View articleOnly a fraction of users spend money on in-app purchases, but those who do, spend up big, according to a report from AppsFlyer. The State of In-App Sp...
View articleThe Super Bowl is one of the year’s most competitive events, so why not make the ad preview into a competition, too? Here are ClickZ‘...
View articleAnalyzing the evolution of Super Bowl advertising campaigns provides relevant insight that is highly useful for today's marketers. Read More...
View article