Rachel’s hot take: she can’t stand email marketing. Not the strategic kind built on real opt-ins, which she respects. The kind where someone scrapes a LinkedIn CSV and starts spamming people who never asked for it. Her actual gripe is open rates. Email hovers around 20%. Texting and SMS blow past 90%. Her pitch: keep email for the big stuff, move the rest to text, WhatsApp, or SMS where people actually see it. She’s polling her WhatsApp community on this and wants marketers to weigh in.
[00:00:00] Greetings, marketers. It is Monday. Another week begins, and so do we as we sweep into a new week, into a new foray of things we have to f*** with. Sorry, I know I open like with an expletive right out the gate, but I do that sometimes. I feel like it’s necessary. This might be a hot take one, but there might be some of you who agree with me. We’ll see.
[00:00:27] First of all, I would like to find out. And y’all, there’s a WhatsApp community we have. So I might maybe I’ll pop a poll in there. We can link to it in the show notes. So I can actually get this feedback from you in real time, though I know we can do polls on different platforms. But I would way rather have you in the community because that’s where we marketers can, you know, commiserate together. All right, poll.
[00:00:47] This podcast poll I’m putting out. Are you a fan of email marketing? And I don’t mean you as in doing email marketing. I mean you as in receiving email marketing. And you can rate it on a scale of one to five. And I’ll go, I will do a poll in the WhatsApp community, and hopefully some of you will come take it because the reason I’m asking is I hate email marketing. I hate receiving email marketing.
[00:01:16] There are very few emails I really actually enjoy and will click on. I see most emails as a necessary evil, as an evil of my experience that I have to go through and endure when I know I’m like a member. Buy a product for something, or I guess I better stay on top of that. I just don’t like it. My inbox gets huge.
[00:01:40] I actually have a Claude scheduled task that runs to clean out my inbox every week. Mostly, I just like to say, “Hey, keep the latest promotional code for that particular sticker giant I love or, you know, table covers now ’cause I get some event marketing stuff for a client or, you know, maybe get and then give me a digest maybe of this one email, a lot of emails I get in one week.” Whereas I don’t have the means of getting a digest from them, but I can make Claude give me that. So, I’ve got some where I’m like, I don’t want to unsubscribe from you ’cause I need the information from you in case, when I have time to go look at it, and I just want it in the ether of my brain.
[00:02:22] I don’t like email marketing. I don’t particularly like doing email marketing. I will do it. I know how to do it. But y’all, I just feel like a 20% open rate, really? And listen, I’m not, I feel like there is a difference between marketing via email and having people’s emails.
[00:02:46] Having people’s emails, as in somebody, and I’m not talking about some of you. And some people out there who go into your LinkedIn and download a CSV of everyone you’re connected to and then add them into your marketing list. Stop that shit right now. Don’t do that. They never opted into that email. Stop it. Okay. I’m not talking about that. I am talking about the actual valid exchange of where a person said, Yes, I am going to complete a form that includes my email address. I’m giving that to you. Because I want the thing you’re giving me enough to give you that. It’s an exchange, okay?
[00:03:25] That is a transaction. Because an email address is a lot. That person is basically, it’s like me, saying, “Well, I guess I’ll be seeing some emails from you in my inbox. More stuff I need to either read and/or declutter, right?” So, there is absolutely value in having your own lists. I totally get that. And of course, if you’re getting emails from people. It stands to reason you should communicate with those people and be like, “Well hey, you know, let me give you reasons to stay engaged with me.” Whether that’s via this email or there are other ways, just a reminder: this, that, or the other.
[00:03:58] Because you do that, there’s gonna be something that breaks through, depending on how niche your emails are or that your topics are, and then your audience and what have you. But something will break through.
[00:04:10] But here’s why I feel ways about email marketing, because there’s this other marketing out there that I feel is becoming a bit more prevalent. I wish that more companies would dabble into. And that is SMS marketing. That is SMS messaging, texting, WhatsApp groups, which is why I do a WhatsApp group. I find, I feel there is just it the it’s so much more impactful.
[00:04:37] A, you have to be so succinct with a text. Oh my gosh. Y’all, this is why I loved Twitter back in the day. And I’m trying to come back to it now that the algorithm’s a little bit back to what it used to be. Because the brevity is just, man, you better write that thing well. You know, and you want to pack so much in. Would you want to do multiple texts? Not really. You just want to do like one. It’s gotta be super awesome.
[00:05:03] But the open rates on text. I don’t know why I’m whispering. It shouldn’t be a secret. It’s over ninety percent. Y’all. I mean, anecdotal even, if I ask you, “Hey, do you open all your emails or do you open all your texts? Which one do you open more?” There’s the first question. The second is how rapidly do you open a text versus how rapidly you open an email? And again, that can totally depend on a subject line. I’m telling you what, I’m opening texts all the time, way faster! Like I even have on my voicemail y’all. And I always check and try to make my voicemails an experience, a greeting, because I want people to laugh, cause my God.
[00:05:43] So, I always try to make them funny. But I always encourage people; I’m like, “Please, I think you should text me. I think you should think about if you’re gonna leave a voicemail right now or not, and the fact that I probably won’t check that for at least another two weeks.” This is true. I’m sorry to say, Sorry to confess, but if you text me, I’ll see it right away, and what I have actually had some doctors’ offices leave me a voicemail and say, “Rachel, we love your voicemail greeting. We don’t have the means to text. We wish we did now.”
[00:06:08] But there you go. I mean, that just brings it like, what we should have texting. We should have more. Of course, we marketers would ruin it because it becomes too bombardy. But I just, I don’t know. That’s where I sit. I am a huge fan. If I had my druthers, all email marketing would there; it’d be so much less, and you’d only get the very most important things. But otherwise, the regular stuff would be text via text, SMS, WhatsApp, whatever you’ve got. Anyway, I guess it’s more of a take than a vent. I did vent a bit about email, anyway.
[00:06:41] But I would love to hear what y’all think. And again, this is a bit of a, you know, hey, yeah, go check out, you know, just in line with what I just said, go check out my WhatsApp group. And you know, you can be anonymous in there. Nobody really needs to know who you are and whatever, but you can take a poll and maybe find some community and stuff and answer texts. Yay.
[00:06:59] All right. I hope you all have a wonderful week. Stick with it. You’re amazing at what you do. You’re brilliant. And you’re going to accomplish great things this week. Talk to y’all soon. Talk to you next Monday. Bye.
Join the WhatsApp community and weigh in on this week’s poll: are you actually a fan of receiving email marketing?