Philip Morgan

Yikes

I've become pessimistic about inbound marketing

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I've become pessimistic about inbound marketing. I hate writing those words because to me, and probably to so many others, the physics of inbound marketing are what was so great about The Internet we grew up with. This physics of inbound was: my interest plus search engines plus other people's content equals (effectively) unlimited cool free information for me to consume. Really, I'm talking about inbound content discovery. Or even more simply: inbound distribution. So-called inbound marketing is merely marketing that makes use of inbound distribution.

Why I've become pessimistic about inbound marketing is a whole other essay. Because I make my living as a marketer, my pessimism about inbound distribution has pushed me to explore alternatives. OpportunityLabs' service offerings are based on outbound distribution -- primarily email. For a few years, there was a free lunch in the outbound distribution world.

The free lunch: new email marketing platforms that are aggressive about growth seem to delay their implementation of certain best practices, and so if you're willing to lie about your adherence to their terms of service, you can email a cold email list and land in more than 40% of those inboxes. Beehiiv was one such platform, and my free lunch involved using their platform to email weekly newsletters very similar to The Argonautic to cold email audiences.

The best practice that these platforms sometimes delay implementing: using multiple email sending infrastructures and assigning new accounts to the "dirty" lower-reputation pool until the account owner requests to be moved to the "clean" higher-reputation pool or the account passes certain age and performance gates and is auto-migrated to the higher-reputation pool. In Beehiiv's case, I saw 40 to 60% open rates sending to cold email audiences using Beehiiv's higher-reputation sending infrastructure. A recent client has never gotten more than 20% open rates. This means that Beehiiv has implemented the multiple-sending-pool best practice and my free lunch is gone. :)

To butcher a lovely saying: The arc of society is long, but it bends towards reputation.

Answering the question of where The Internet is headed is also a whole other essay (and one I'm not at all ready to attempt!), but here's a tentative take: any aspect of The Internet that bypassed or promises to bypass building a reputation for yourself or your business is probably at best a temporary free lunch as your traverse the inevitable arc towards building that reputation and at worse a wasteful detour from that same destination.

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