The nature of the internet and technology makes disruption a daily norm, not just displacing the very elements that brought it fame, with something more better, faster and safer, but introducing better ones to make our lives easier. Combine technology and the web, and you get to run your blog today at price points that would have been laughed at a few years back.

But as the market expanded, so did the competition. Long before there were different channels like social media or video, email was the biggest battleground. In fact, today, it is still considered the most valued resource to create brand awareness and maintain brand recall. Studies by the DMA report, 72% of marketers feel email is a great channel to build loyal and active customers.

Yet, as different market forces are putting channels like email through the litmus test of user appeal and relevance, lead-generation strategies are undergoing a transition. If your newsletter sign-ups are taking a dip in performance, be it in form submissions or drop-offs. It’s good to consider the below points to understand fluctuations and forecasts you must prepare for. Let’s hop in.

Commercial Email Marketing Blues & Focus on Brand Loyalty

The email marketing story was scripted by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager who sent the first commercial email to around 400 recipients promoting his company’s product back in 1978. That brought him about $13 million in sales, and as the history books say, there has been no turning back for email promotions ever since.

Fast forward ten years to the 1990s. The internet revolution started gripping the world, with email service providers offering personal email addresses to individuals while heralding the era of commercial emails that were cost-effective and result-oriented to the marketer. The flip side was the spate of unrestricted mass-blast emails marketers started inundating users’ inboxes with. These emails were sent with no regard to the relevance of the offers to the recipients.

Email as an industry took quite a beating, which led to regulation and numerous complaints from readers around. Marketers realised that they had to adopt email techniques that would foster loyalty, like newsletter sign-ups or segmented emailing. They also started to extract and use data to understand more about their recipient segments, fine-tuned their strategies, to increase open and click-through rates.

Emails sent in the 1980s had just plain text. In the 1990s, HTML was integrated followed by the 2000s where portability made email consumption on the mobile increase, leading up to an era today where email is visual, interactive, and segmented. There was a time when RSS feeds were the norm to follow updates from a website like a news portal, but the medium lacked the visual and the filtering appeal that email could offer.

The email could offer that with ease, and much more. Additionally, email marketing has empowered readers with multiple spam protocol layers and options for readers to block or mark irrelevant messages as spam. Although statistics show 57% of respondents think there are just too many email messages, targeting a subscription-based mode leads to subscribers showing a 3x likeliness to share email content on social media compared to visitors coming in through other channels (according to Quick Sprout).

Besides, consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those who didn’t receive offers via email. It still shows the stickiness factor of email remains, but tapping it involves careful planning.

Compare the era when email was the only cost-effective and target-oriented medium for marketers to get their message across, to today, and you would notice a world of difference. Most of all, the players in your business offering similar services have a robust email play. It gives readers a vast pool of content to choose from, making the job tough for a particular brand to stand out with a lead management strategy like sign-up form engagement.

Besides, there are chances that readers would cater time to the leaders in the market, but the engagement game isn’t a walk in the park for the latter too. As a small or medium business, it is likely a tough ask to reach the Top 5 providers within a short span and command mindshare that is reducing every year. The challenges don’t end there.

Readers have only so much time to engage with your email and have become discerning in separating content customised to their requirements from content which isn’t. Email addresses have become virtual currencies, where exchange happens when the value is derived from both sides.

The positives of email cannot be discounted. You can be sure that your email is sent and your reader definitely sees the subject line unless he chooses to filter it out of your inbox or block it downright. It then shows that you haven’t offered enough value by not using the available date. But if you talk about value, what if you were able to offer more than just value via content through the blogs your share?

Could it be possible that you could review your client’s website performance for free with a site audit tool? That could be your persuasion tool during the sign-up form phase, getting a definite buy-in from them to share their contact with you, and allowing your brand to occupy differentiated mindshare. In their mind? Growth Robotics, for example, offers an easy-to-embed auditing tool called RoboAuditor that performs an analysis of 70 factors, giving your clients valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their site’s performance.

But what if this went even better? What if you could offer this tool to your clients, to embed it on their website with a simple line of code, so they could use it to build leads of their own through their audience? This is again possible with the RoboAuditor tool, that is similar to Hubspot’s Website Grader, allowing you to target, offer value, and secure leads at a reasonable cost that someone would find it hard to believe. Get a lead over your competitors by adopting new approaches to help you grow your business faster.


RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit tool which generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.