The Wild West

In New Zealand, email marketing and publishing is a fledgling market. Because of low barriers to entry, the market is now growing fast.

The volume of email newsletters and marketing emails is far outstripping the knowledge and experience required to ensure high deliverability, good impact, audience enaggement and retention, and important aspects of email best practice.

Low cost is also a negative factor. Many would-be email marketers take the view that low delivery costs offer an opportunity to test a marketing medium - they see it as a roll of the dice.
Experience dictates that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing properly.

In the crowded, noisy marketplace that is email received by consumers, poorly prepared marketing emails will disappear without trace.

Email newsletters which are written with the publisher, rather than the recipient in mind, will quickly slip off the "must read" list.

If marketers and publishers in New Zealand want to utilise the undoubted benefits of email to become an important, sustainable medium of communication between them and their audiences, then they need to take a step back.

Email has very quickly become a mature medium, and even though it is evolving on a daily basis, it already requires a level of knowledge and experience which can only reside with experts.

Next time I will start to look at the first step - planning an email strategy.