Our Channels and the Morgue

(Special thanks to Charlie Cadigan for being my guest blogger last week so I could take a week off and vacation. The piece on Human Rights Campaign was simply amazing, and I hope everyone enjoyed it.)

Speaking of enjoying things ... I saw a headline the other day in the Harvard Business Review that just made me laugh out loud. But before I tell you what it is, let's just think back a few years or maybe a bit further in history. How many of you direct marketers out there remember responding to the concern that "direct mail is dead"? How many of you remember reading those headlines in giant font that said, "Is E-mail Killing Direct Mail?"

I thought about Googling it but just assumed I would have returned a gajillion results for articles titled, "Is Direct Mail Dead?" And look at us now — direct mail is still one of the most preferred methods of fundraising communication with more than just one generation and is still alive and well across marketing for both commercial and nonprofits.

So, after years and years of answering this question at conferences and within meetings, imagine how funny I found it that there is an article in the Harvard Business Review that questions if e-mail is dead.

Granted, the article is mostly referencing the use of e-mail from a work perspective and outlines how much e-mail people receive in an average workday, the type of e-mails they're receiving, etc. But the irony of it just made me think further about how e-mail is doing.

There have been a lot of reports lately about declining response rates, declining open rates and much more. One recent report looks at the state of e-mail marketing as of the end of 2012. While I chuckled because our industry likes to wring its hands and worry about which channel is dead and which channels are alive, the report from Return Path does show some troubling trends. The headline sums it up nicely: "Engaging e-mail subscribers got harder toward the end of 2012."