Death to email - Thanks, GDPR!

Since roughly one week before GDPR went into effect on May 25th, inboxes around the world over have been flooded with emails about updated privacy policies and new permissions. You and everyone I know, have been deleting these without opening or reading the content. The early stats say that 4 of 5 Americans are completely ignoring them.

Which oddly is not out of line with the overall open rate for unsolicited emails. Email companies like MailChimp claim that only 20 percent of all marketing emails get opened anyway, but this new 1 of 5 number suggests that only 20% of the 20% that normally open unsolicited emails are opening them which translates to a mere 5%.

Under the new GDPR rules, companies are still free to send emails to customers who have purchased a product from them in the past, but they can’t continue to solicit the attention of non-customers without first asking for permission. Emails acquired through those annoying little pop-up messages for mailing lists, promises of special offers, or those that have been purchased from another marketer … all have to stop unless the recipient opts in to continue receiving them.

While most of the emails sent in the last 4 weeks are from businesses “informing their users of privacy policy updates meant to comply with GDPR”, a large percentage are from businesses asking for permission to “continue” sending their email marketing messages. If no one opts in, the business can never contact them again without facing the threat of the EU fines of up to four percent of the company’s annual revenue.

The result is clear. Since almost no one is opting in, email marketers have just lost a whole sales channel.

According to a CNBC report, one email marketing company’s entire client base have already (in just 4 short weeks) lost 80% of their audience. And by the way, if 80% of your audience has never bought anything from you, you might want to re-examine your business model.

Those who know me, know that I have never been a proponent of email marketing. And while this GDPR news brings me a bit of schadenfreude joy, it also reveals the sham that email marketing has always leveraged to help the modern sales rep avoid the only tool that has ever facilitated a sale: Live conversations with prospective customers.

There is no question that email marketing and social selling are actual things. They exist, and some people are even good at it. But to place all your sales and marketing marbles in email and social selling thinking that they are going to take you to the promised land is na?ve at best. For every email ROI statistic, I can give you the underpinning caveats. For example, ‘For every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $38-45’ turns out to be true only if you are in the B2C markets and only if you are measuring ROI against banner ads, catalogs, SEO, Mobile, etc.

Maybe for some Pinterest-friendly lifestyle brands, social selling really works. But in the B2B trenches, chasing leads on LinkedIn is only a good way to identify decision makers or maybe purchasing authority. Making sales by trolling LinkedIn all day long is not going to happen. In fact, the entire effectiveness of most LinkedIn “sales strategy” plays are a hoax.

Email marketing may remain a viable approach in the near term as people figure out how to game the system and bring that channel back into play and social media touches are important as a component of a mixed touch, multi-channel marketing plan. Content remains important to make sure that when you reach out to your prospects you are always adding value, but there is a lie around this as well.

Many marketing strategists believe and will try to convince you that producing content creates brand authority and positions you as a leader, which in theory is accurate, but in this era, with everyone producing content, we have a huge supply of what has become instead just more marketing noise making it difficult to distinguish value between one piece of “leadership” and another. With our continually shrinking bandwidth, most professionals ignore (unsolicited) content and retreat to the marketing channel that has been number one since the ice age, conversations with a sales person.  

The modern B2B buyer independently seeks out information about products and services and has no need for interaction with traditional sales during this awareness stage, where buyers depend on product review search and vendor websites as their top channels to find information about their product interest. But, they don’t depend on emails to take them there, nor does the 1.9% open rate data suggest that they respond to emails that promote a solution.

Today’s B2B buyers are independent and sophisticated and as we have seen from the blow-back over Google’s Deluxe, will not respond well to AI-enabled outreach either.

Once they’re ready to buy, they want to connect live with a sales representative, and the good news for sales people who like to sell, is that most business buyers want to meet with a sales rep during the consideration phase after they’ve done some research and know they need more information to make a sound decision.

The trick is to know when that moment arrives and to be prepared to seize it. Email marketing and social selling alone will not deliver that prospect to you on some golden platter at exactly that right moment. While the Internet has enabled the disruption and transformation of many business processes with lots more on the horizon, human nature hasn’t changed in hundreds of years.

People buy from people. They most especially like to buy from people with whom they have built a relationship and a basis for trust and confidence.

And, now thanks to the GDPR, you may find that talking with your prospects and building that relationship is the only effective sales channel you have left, forcing you to do what you should have been doing all along.