A Marketers thoughts on Email Marketing Post-GDPR

It’s been over a week since the dreaded GDPR finally came into play, and now that the dust has had a chance to settle, I just wanted to put my thoughts down and start a discussion on email marketing as we enter this new post-GDPR world.

First things first…

…It’s not all that bad.

Now I know you’re probably thinking, “But my list has shrunk massively, how can it not be bad?” but hear me out for a minute. As much as I see your point, I struggle to believe that your email marketing can really have been all that effective pre-GDPR if the majority of your list opted out when given the chance.

The way I look at it, email marketing had become lazy marketing. Having devolved over the past few years, email became a spammy marketing channel and with such large lists of people, many of whom had never opted in for emails in the first place, marketers had gotten lazy with the content they were sharing over email, giving little thought of the quality of what they where saying.

Now…

…we’ve got an opportunity.

When you really think about it, would you rather email 1000 people who barely even open your emails or 100 people who care about and want to read what you’ve got to say? It’s not really that difficult to pick, is it?

Looking at our own mailing lists, we have only retained around 10% of our email marketing contacts, which is actually pretty good all things considered. Despite losing thousands of contacts in the GDPR purge, I feel far more enthused to rethink our email marketing strategy and give our now much smaller mailing list the content they’ve actually asked for.

Now is the time to seriously look at email marketing again, thinking about the best approach for your audience and also considering if email marketing is even really right for your marketing strategy at all. (Not every marketing channel is right for every business!)

So…

…let’s make email marketing great again!

With such complacency and laziness on the part of email marketers, it’s really no wonder GDPR was seen as a chance to break free from the hundreds and thousands of email marketing lists people had somehow become part of.

It’s now our job as marketers to re-engage our audiences, gain back their trust and develop genuine and meaningful relationships with them online.

My focus moving forward is to create helpful, insightful and engaging email marketing content for both our own and our client’s audiences as well as finding new and honest ways of growing email marketing lists. (Click here to subscribe to our awesome emails ??)

If you want to discuss the best way to move forward with email marketing or are looking for some help, book one of our FREE grow your business sessions or email [email protected] and I’ll be more than happy to chat.

What are your thoughts on email marketing post-GDPR and what are your plans moving forward?