When the CMO of the largest CRM vendor in the world say that the 'marketing campaign' is over - and they sell marketing automation software - the world of B2B marketing is shifting.

We ask this question to all of our clients - do you use email marketing campaigns?

If the answer is yes, we then ask if they ever consider the data analytics from these campaigns - we get varying responses, but for the most part, when we drill down in to this, they are getting really poor results. 

Looking at this research, an average email open rate of 17.9% - https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/guides/email-marketing-benchmarks/ - if a Sales Director had a team who had these conversion rates, they, and the team would be fired. 

Then we interrogate further, how many bounce-backs because you have incorrect data, so the time and effort that is wasted on all of this.

Here is a task for you - whichever email system you have, work and personal, go into the Spam filter and look at how much is now being automatically siphoned out, without you even knowing. So, if this is happening in your inbox, what is to say that the same is not happening with all your "campaigns" and the inboxes they are intended for.

By the way, Google is now blocking 100million spam emails a day https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/6/18213453/gmail-tensorflow-machine-learning-spam-100-million - that equates to 36 Billion 500 million emails a year. Even if each of those cost 1 cent / penny to send - that is 36million $/£ down the drain - but we know that the cost is much higher than that - salary cost, cost of content, cost of software, cost of office space the person is sitting in, I could go on. 

That seems money well spent to me, don't you think? Said no-one ever.

Of course, you will have a select audience who will want to receive your content via email, as that is their communication channel of choice with you, no doubt as they trust your content and brand - according to the average stats above, that is 14% of your audience. So, by all means keep on emailing them, you know who these people are after all. As for everyone else, please stop. Just stop.

You need to move all of this to social, but not just your corporate channels, you need to activate the voice of your organisation - people buy people still. They same goes for online. Everyone has a network. Market through it, not to it. Research shows that your organic reach can increase by as much 500% when you use your employee network vs that of the corporate channels.

The next generation of employee coming in from College / University barely use email, they are on multiple social media platforms - I presented to 200 boys and parents and my old school last Saturday - the next one all the kids are in is https://discordapp.com/ and are you familiar with https://www.patreon.com/ ? Thought not.

The world of social and social media marketing is evolving at a frightening pace - stop focusing on a channel that is in the dark ages, which interrupts and is one dimensional.

As Stephanie says, we are in the age of continuous experience and storytelling.