Thursday, January 31, 2008By: Des Cahill
Two Thousand and Seven was a great year for e-mail and 2008 is going to be even better. The key for e-mail success in 2008 will be continued vigilance in the cause of online brand reputation and careful segmentation and treatment of your outbound e-mail. The best practice of sending fewer e-mail messages to a more targeted audience of customers in your database will emerge as a standard in 2008. Less e-mail will mean more success for your business, whether you define success in terms of reliable communications, revenue, click-through, registrations, retention or other success factors.
In that spirit of "less is more," let's look back at 2007 and think more about 2008!
In 2007, email became sexy again! Witness the IPOs of Constant Contact and S-1 filings of ExactTarget and Convio. The public markets are enthused about e-mail again and the merger and acquisition realm sees it no differently. The acquisition of eDialog by publicly-traded e-commerce platform company GSI Commerce shows how valuable e-mail is as a core component of any online business or platform.
The DMA published its annual statistics guide in October 2007 and once again cited e-mail as the highest ROI online marketing medium. DMA projects e-mail marketing to generate an average of $48.56 in return for every $1 spent. That's why online marketers love e-mail; done right, it's incredibly cost-effective. And e-mail usage is booming among consumers too. According to a recent Pew Internet Research study over 90 percent of U.S. Internet users use e-mail regularly and most of them use e-mail once a day or more.
When measured as a percentage of consumer time spent online, email once again staked its claim as the number one online application -- beating out search, news, traffic and weather applications. Furthermore, penetration into the population and the frequency of e-mail usage are both growing year over year.
But you didn't need me to tell you that consumers love e-mail. You know you're addicted to your Blackberry, your webmail, your Outlook and so is everyone around you!
That's not to say that 2007 was all just a bed of roses for e-mail. Unfortunately, spam continues to cast a long, dark shadow over the world of e-mail marketing. Anti-spam solution vendors are telling us that over 90 percent of e-mail traffic on the Internet is spam. Our own Habeas data tells us that 99.8 percent of IP addresses sending e-mail are, in fact, spammers!
The good news is that most of the spam isn't getting to your inboxes or cluttering the inboxes of your customers. The bad news is that the continued growth of spam levels means that you need to continue to vigilantly protect your online brand and your connection to your customers' inboxes. Your company needs to stand out and join that 0.02 percent of senders who aren't spammers and whose legitimate e-mail is delivered regularly to customer inboxes.
How can the holy grail of reliable e-mail delivery be accomplished? Through hard work and perseverance, continual segmentation, testing and self-education. It requires getting your entire team -- including marketing, IT and executive management -- on board with adopting e-mail best practices and working with the right vendors as partners to execute those practices.
Simple, right? It isn't.
It's a lot of hard work to do e-mail well. It was hard work in 2007 and it will continue to be a challenge in 2008. We call all this hard work "online reputation management": keeping a focus on and visibility into your brand's online reputation with ISPs, blacklists and, most importantly, your customers.
All that discipline pays off when you are thinking carefully about what offers to send to different audiences on your prospect list. Do you send offers for a 20 percent discount on Coach handbags to the same people who have been responding to your Super Bowl Lazyboy promotion? Probably not a good idea, as you'll generate complaints, unsubscribes and brand erosion amongst the Super Bowl set.
For 2008, the industry must adopt the mantra of "less is more." Before your next campaign, think about segmenting your list -- by gender, historic response rate, self-disclosed interest or item last bought -- and tailoring more targeted offers to those segments. Your volume may be less, but your complaints will drop dramatically, your unsubscribe churn will decrease and your business results should be solid. The days of "batch and blast" are long gone.
Your 2008 New Year's resolution must be a commitment to building a discipline of online reputation management that reduces the outreach that drives customers away and, through intelligent targeting, brings "more" success to your business.
