E-Mail Marketing's Future... Right Now
By Peter Prestipino, Editor-in-Chief and Mike Phillips, Senior Editor
Search engines drive website traffic; social networks promote brand
awareness and blogs encourage community engagement. But what about
e-mail? E-mail marketing drives results — in the form of traffic, awareness and
engagement. And don’t think for a moment that your top competitor doesn’t
realize its importance to their bottom line either.
Regardless of the size of your enterprise, email
and e-mail marketing play integral
roles in your success. But the shift toward
e-mail as part of a broader marketing strategy
is not a new one; rather, marketers are
gaining a new focus. Those charged with
Web success have always understood its
importance to their bottom line — both
quantitatively and qualitatively. Before
social media darlings like Facebook and
Twitter, and stalwarts like Google became
forever intertwined with how we compete
online, there was e-mail.
THE STATE OF E-MAIL TODAY
According to the June “2009 Marketing
Trends Survey” by StrongMail Systems,
42 percent of nearly 1,000 global business
leaders polled plan to increase their marketing
budgets in 2009. Of those, 81 percent
intend to increase their e-mail marketing
spend. Spending on e-mail marketing,
which has flowed seemingly
unabated for years, shows no signs of
slowing down — even as social networks
and search engines continue to dominate
the marketing headlines.
What makes e-mail so appealing to
marketers? Unlike social media marketing
where a monetary valuation is often arbitrarily
placed on interactions with consumers,
e-mail marketing is trackable. Its
results are so obvious that e-mail marketers
are more results-oriented and ultimately
accountable for their performance. While
social media certainly has its place in the
Web marketing world, it has nothing on
e-mail. And the proof is in the budget.
Spending on e-mail marketing will
expand at double-digit rates for the next
five years, according to a report from private
equity firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson
— expanding at 18.5 percent each year. So
what’s the reason for this continued
growth? Perhaps because e-mail is less
expensive or that it’s incredibly effective but
that doesn’t tell the whole story. The reason
e-mail is growing at such phenomenal rates
is because consumers rely on it and e-mail
marketing vendors are getting better at
enabling Web professionals to use their
services as integrated communication platforms.
This intersection of consumer needs
and marketer capabilities leads down one
of the Web’s shortest roads to success. But
marketers need a navigator. That comes in
the form of e-mail service provider (ESPs).
It is important to periodically address
the essential criteria for selecting an ESP
(those services that often support part
of our overall marketing objectives) and
discuss the future of the greatest marketing
tool ever to influence consumers on
the Web.
BASIC, YET ESSENTIAL
ESP SELECTION CRITERIA
Success, whether on the Web or in the
brick-and-mortar world, often depends
on our individual ability to influence the
final outcome. For this reason, starting a
long-term outreach campaign that
embraces and influences an audience that
will ultimately purchase your products or
services is imperative. Selecting an ESP
that facilitates a proper list building initiative
and eases management complexities
and deliverability issues is perhaps the
first and most important consideration
you will make related to marketing with
e-mail. But increasingly ESPs are offering
so much more.
While the basic selection criteria
detailed herein should act as a general
guide, as the needs of every enterprise
will be different, they are but a starting
point. There are many more considerations
to make; including how each vendor
handles authentication (Sender ID,
DKIM, SPF), quality control features,
third-party integration and more. If vendors
can’t master the most basic features
(which are often related directly to client
usability), there is little chance they will
be able to handle the greater challenges
of marketing via e-mail.
RECIPIENT PRIORITY
Assessing an ESP’s ability to foster an environment
of permission-based marketing
should always be a key criterion. The manner
in which individual ESPs do this will
vary but, in every case, service providers
should enable the development of a subscription
form, validate the accuracy of that
information (through a double-opt-in
process), and provide storage of that list.
While this might seem obvious to many,
there are vendors in the market that don’t
make these features a priority. Some leave
the responsibility of best practices solely to
the marketer. In those cases, poor deliverability
or even worse, blacklisting, is what
results when we approach e-mail marketing
without essential tools and support.
Subscription and customer management
are important aspects of e-mail marketing
success. Failure to follow established guidance
in these regards often, results in poor
response — something all marketers intend
to avoid. When ESPs support the priority
you place on recipients, a safer, more efficient
e-mail marketing environment results.
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Deliverability Benchmark Data:
Are your e-mails hitting the inbox? Web success with e-mail depends greatly
on high rates of deliverability. Pivotal Veracity released its Retail-Industry
Summer Deliverability Benchmark results in mid-September. How do you
stack up with those in your industry and against all verticals? Merchants who primarily sell movies, books and music top the list of
retailer deliverability, with an average 95 percent inbox rate. That’s 18 percent
higher than the combined average of all other industry sectors, tracked
between June 1 and September 1, 2009.
REPORTING PRIORITY
Understanding performance on both a
macro and micro level provides granular
insights into not only the quality of a list,
but the efficacy of your messaging and marketing
strategy. Being able to access percampaign
data on open rates, click-through
rates and even deliverability inform marketers
on what’s working and what can be
improved upon. Detailed reporting gives
the ability to make adjustments when necessary
or stay with the plan you have
already developed. But it’s not just the success
metrics that should be scrutinized —
failure metrics, such as the ability to track
opt-out subscribers and SPAM complaints
also yield insights into performance and
can provide early warnings before poor performance
strikes.
BASIC-FEATURE COMPLIANT
Many marketers have lofty expectations as
to what they want to accomplish (typically
asking for unique and esoteric features),
but the majority still manage very simple
campaigns. The presence of basic features,
therefore, will prove to be another important
criterion on which an ESP should be
judged. The ability to quickly and correctly
create individual e-mails and campaigns
(facilitated perhaps by the presence of prestructured
templates), to preview and test
content and run SPAM checks, schedule
delivery and set up autoresponders are
basic yet very important tools for professional
e-mail marketers.
If you are an in-house e-mail marketer
or using a service provider that does not
meet these most basic selection criteria, it’s
time to consider an alternate vendor.
ADVANCED-FEATURE FOCUSED AND
FORWARD THINKING ESP
Perhaps most important, the ESP you
choose must have an eye to the future.
And much of e-mail’s future is shaping up
right now. It’s very possible that many
advanced and powerful technologies are
already available to you. These might
even prove to be elements that completely
reshape your e-mail strategy. If your
ESP is doing a poor job communicating
new features and capabilities to you, call them out on it. And if you find that your
ESP is woefully behind in the innovation
department, or not paying attention to
future e-mail user needs and trends, it’s
time to move on.
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RSS MEETS E-MAIL:
On-demand e-mail marketing software Gold Lasso recently completed the development of a feature that allows its eLoop users to create e-mail messages and campaigns
based on RSS feeds. Users merge content from RSS feeds into their messages and set campaigns to automatically execute
when the feeds are updated. “A large portion of e-mail marketing budgets and time are spent performing message assembly and managing content,” says
Elie D. Asher, president, Gold Lasso. “The answer to help unwind some of the vagaries of message assembly is incorporating RSS feeds into e-mail messages.
This is useful for people using Twitter, publishers who update their sites regularly and have newsletters based on updates, press releases, or any other
type of timely content that gets posted to a website regularly."
THE FUTURE OF E-MAIL
MARKETING ... IS NOW
It’s challenging to forecast what’s upcoming
for e-mail marketing — but it’s also
quite revealing.
Website Magazine spoke with many of
the industry’s thought leaders on the
future of e-mail marketing and their
insights show that, as it stands today, marketers
have a whole host of opportunities
at their disposal right now. Making a commitment
to use what’s available is another
matter entirely.
Segmentation (the ability to create smaller,
customized sub-lists from a larger master
file) has been available to marketers for many
years but is only beginning to gain traction.
“The majority of our customers have an
understanding that they want to segment,”
says Derek Harding, CEO, Innovyx Inc.
“What slows down that advancement is that
many marketing departments are short-term
focused or event driven and, as a result, don’t
have an overall complete view of their customer
or what kind of communication they
want for them.”
Those who recognize the value proposition
in segmentation reap the benefits.
For example, one large, multi-national
Innovyx client has been running a dynamic
newsletter for four years and actively uses
segmentation. This has enabled them to
go beyond what one might expect. By
tapping into consumer behavior on the
site and through previous e-mails, the
client was able to make a more informed decision as to what content appeared in
that dynamic newsletter. And, in one
instance, created more than 933 segments
— in seven different languages. While that
was the most segmentation that Harding
has seen, it does show the potential, and
how targeted e-mail can become.
Maximizing list value will also be a
focus of e-mail marketing moving forward.
“Marketers will get more involved
with engagement by determining their
subscriber/recipients levels of activity or
inactivity,” says Ross Kramer, CEO,
Listrak. “The result is they will start to
speak differently to their customers. As
the market matures, it’s about getting
more out of what you already have —
more water out of the sponge.”
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E-MAIL FOR USERS AND MARKETERS: SenderOK, a startup division of Web CEO, has a handy e-mail plugin that works
in Outlook, Gmail, Live and Yahoo!. The plugin puts social network profiles into
the header panel of messages, sorts e-mail according to past behavior toward
the sender (including whether the user visited the sender’s website recently),
places corporate favicons in the inbox when an e-mail has been authenticated
by the user (anti-phishing icons) and ensures authenticated e-mail stays out of
the spam box.
All ESPs provide tracking tools, but
industry leaders such as Listrak, iContact,
ExactTarget and many others enable marketers
to take existing metrics such as open
and click-through rates, and see which
recipients don’t take action. By segmenting
a list of those inactive recipients, marketers
can “power reengagement,” Kramer says.
At last year’s Listrak conference, Kramer
promised to make engagement metrics
front and center and its spring release did
just that. “Implementing engagement
makes sure you’re not over-mailing [or
risking alienation] and speaking more
directly to those that aren’t that engaged,”
Kramer adds.
Many expect that in the future, e-mail
marketers will start to wrap their collective
heads around abandonment and what
they can do about it. For
example, Listrak is using
SeeWhy in its newlyreleased
Conductor, an
event-triggered system
that makes running abandonment
programs easier
and more effective.
Working with SeeWhy
allows marketers to add a
string of JavaScript to a
page and send a custom
message to the user when
abandonment occurs.
If merchants can look
directly into the activity on
their shopping cart, they
will see a lot of consumers
leaving. Solutions such as
SeeWhy — with which
many ESPs are now partnering
— have yielded
some positive results. For example, one merchant
had 2,500 abandonments, of which
Listrak brought back 55 orders. That’s significant
recouped revenue.
Another interesting trend is the coupling
of e-mail with other technologies.
One example is combining e-mail with customer
relationship management (CRM) —
something that is provided by ExactTarget
with its integration of SalesForce.com and
Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Most businesses
are tasked with staying connected to users
during lengthy buying cycles. “By coupling
e-mail with CRM, clients can automate email
to provide information that is relevant
to the needs and preferences of the IT decision
maker,” says Joel Book, director of
eMarketing education, ExactTarget.
Integrating with third-party systems
does not stop at CRM. E-mail vendors routinely
provide integration with analytics
vendors too. Coupling with a company like
Omniture enables ExactTarget clients to
understand the unique needs of their customers
while delivering information that
aids in the decision-making process.
Coupling e-mail with social media is
perhaps the most forward-facing and public
integration. Social media marketing is hot
and most people are interested in finding
out how to leverage these networking websites
to attract more consumers to their
brand. “When you have the ability to forward
e-mail to friends and colleagues and
direct them to your social media site, you
have a huge multiplying effect on your
message,” Book says.
Smart brands are now empowering
their e-mail subscribers (their brand advocates)
to forward messages to their friends
who might be interested in the product or
offer, through their preferred social network.
ExactTarget recently partnered with
ShareThis to provide such a capability
called SocialForward.
These are not just theories and case
studies, they are real world examples
where this can be seen working successfully.
DreamFields Pasta is the perfect
example. At last count it built a marketing
database in excess of 280,000 brand advocates
in a span of 24 months. And those
advocates are actively sharing brand information
with their friends. The more we
empower our consumers to take charge of
the message and disseminate it to the people
important to them, the more that email
marketing becomes a pull proposition.
“As much as we like to think we control
the message, it’s really the customer,”
Book adds.
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E-Mail Forever:
E-mail marketing service provider MailChimp made its service pretty much
irresistible in September as the company announced the introduction of its
Forever Free pricing plan. The new service level allows subscribers to send
up to 500 e-mails per campaign and 3,000 e-mails per month at no cost.
“We’re aiming to empower smaller groups like artists, musicians, non-profits,
small businesses and hand-crafters to communicate effectively at no cost,”
says Ben Chestnut, co-founder, MailChimp. “That’s why we’re calling this
’Power to the People.’ We want to give everyone all the tools they need to
send professional, permission-based e-mail campaigns.”
E-MAIL STILL MATTERS
In Website Magazine’s February 2006 cover
story “Emailology — A Best Practice Guide
for E-mail,” we postulated that e-mail marketers
in the future would increasingly be
driven by a need to deliver the right promotion
to the right consumer at the right
time. For many, that forecast has come
true. But much work still needs to be done.
It’s clear that personalization (whether
basic or more advanced) is more approachable
now than it was back in February
2006, but we’ve ultimately failed, thanks to
the complexity associated with segmentation
— which can drive both revenue and
response to entirely new and more productive
and lucrative levels.
Over the next few years, know that a
deeper level of integration will occur with
existing software solutions, most will
become increasingly familiar with and in
tune with the needs of their consumers.
And e-mail, with all its complexities
and challenges, will remain a key to your
Web success.


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