There is a war for attention and a war for privacy going on. Apple is the knight of privacy. As Apple changed the permissions to track data on apps last year, Facebook and other apps have seen their ad revenue decline sharply. Even data on email opening on iOS has been hindered. Only 16 percent of Apple users have opted in to being tracked. This obviously hurts the ad revenue platforms such as Google and Meta, but this also hurts Mailchimp and other email marketing companies, as well. Prior to this change in tracking on iOS, marketers had gotten sloppy. Most vendors in our space from conferences to providers have a natural tendency to email subscribers constantly. In fact, when managing my email preferences for one Teams/Webex provider, I realized it had subscribed me to more than 10 lists. No matter how significant a company thinks it is to a prospect or customer, and regardless of how awesome you think your content is – Gong, I am talking to you here – no one wants to get an email daily from a vendor. No one. The whole idea of email marketing is salience – be top of mind when they are ready to buy. One personal injury attorney has spent hundreds of millions advertising “for the people” to ingrain it into people’s brains. You can’t get away from the TV and radio commercials. But people can delete and unsubscribe from your emails. Sentiment to the irrational marketing is often, “I will never use them.” That isn’t exactly the response they were looking for. The other concept with email marketing is value. I’ll give Gong and HubSpot credit; they produce an abundance of good content, but there is too much of it to read. With buyers using digital content to move two-thirds of the way through the buying process before they contact a vendor, buyers are counting on content to guide their decisions. Buyers have too many options. There are more than 2,000 UCaaS/hosted PBX providers in North America. There are hundreds of CCaaS/CX vendors. To assist the buyers, use content wisely to add value to the buying process. That content has to be so relevant that it can rise above the other vendors vying for the same consideration. An element that is lacking is a clear and concise value proposition. In other words, Why you? Why should a buyer choose your company over the others? In my experience, the answer to this question is hollow. It surprises me that in a world where the choices are massive and the currency is a buyer’s attention, the marketing departments have not provided clear and concise answers to the value proposition. Now that iOS users can’t be tracked when they open an email or as they move along the world wide web from site to site researching, how will martech evolve? One CHANNEL MANAGEMENT ‘MARTECH’ MUSINGS FOR 2023 By Peter Radizeski 38 CHANNELV ISION | JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2023
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