Marketing Trends & Fashion Go Through Cycles

I never threw away my suede fringe jacket or my bellbottoms because I love them and they bring back so many good memories. And then, behold, just last year, I wore them again and no one batted an eye. It was time; it was their time to re-emerge. What’s old is new again. It works for clothing, music, furniture and most everything you can think of — including marketing.

High-tech online marketing trends have dominated the conversation for so long now that they’ve become mainstream. And usually when a concept, product or any marketable item becomes ubiquitous, someone’s going to go retro until the next big breakthrough appears.

Hello? Anybody Home?

Most surveys and number-crunchers estimate that about 85 percent of American adults use email. They may not all use it every day, but they’ve got an account and access to the internet. That makes email pretty much ubiquitous — and like the meaning of ubiquitous: it’s everywhere, it’s everywhere!

Let’s keep it on the low side and say that most people with an email account receive an average of 25 messages a day (the actual average was approaching 90 in 2015). So 25 a day is certainly on the low, low side. But consider that number for the sake of argument — that’s still a lot of messages to sludge through on a daily basis.

If you’re like most people, you can’t go a day without checking your email. Miss a day, and your inbox gets so clogged up that it takes an entire day just to trudge through it all. Meanwhile, email has been one of the top marketing trends for so long now that even older, staid brands (think AARP) rely on it. After a while, the Delete button becomes your best asset.

For the Price of a Stamp

Never mind the cost of actually using email for marketing purposes. You can pay hundreds (or even thousands) of dollars for email lists, only to experience many unsubscribes and wasted effort. You can pay a marketing trends company hundreds or thousands of dollars a month to generate ads in social media — the long arm of the inbox that has replaced email for younger adults and teens.

But for just 49 cents, the price of a stamp, you can reach a very special place in the home, business, office or private box of your target market. And odds are that your mailbox competition is pretty low these days. If you think it’s just not cool to use “snail mail” for marketing, check out the music industry blog music 3.0. They refer to hot new snail mail campaigns by the likes of Taylor Swift and lesser-knowns like King Krule and Animal Collective, who are returning to stamped mail for exposure.

Novel, Yet Not a Bad Read

All your customers have a home and an address. Getting mail delivered in a hard copy is just novel enough to stand out from the avalanche of marketing trends people get everywhere else, from their TVs to their email inboxes. The U.S. Postal Service can get pricey if you don’t have a targeted mailing list, but then again, so can random Facebook ads.

With so many barriers to break to actually reach an inbox — think spam filters, ad blockers, algorithms and unsubscribe boxes — it may be time to tap into the old, tried-and-true turf of snail mail. Stand out while you still can, before the post office undergoes a retro resurgence. Jump on this marketing trends bandwagon early. And just as newsletters are making a huge comeback, pull out your headbands and leggings — or your fringe and bellbottoms — and join the march from yesterday to tomorrow.

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