Lessons remain to be learned in e-mail marketing
E-mail is a valuable tool in every Internet retailer’s marketing arsenal. It helps a retailer get the word out, quite literally, about products and promotions, and helps cement branding efforts.
But e-mail marketing has now reached a point where it no longer is the new, vanguard marketing medium delighting consumers by its novelty; rather, it is accepted and in fact valued by consumers just as other marketing mediums such as direct mail and television commercials are accepted, says Shar VanBoskirk, a Forrester Research Inc. senior analyst who specializes in e-mail issues.
She cites Forrester research that backs this up. “E-mail has reached a maturity in terms of: consumer penetration, 97% of online consumers use it; marketer penetration, 97% of marketers use or plan to use e-mail marketing this year; and consumer attitudes toward the medium, 77% of consumers feel they get too many e-mail marketing messages, and 72% delete most e-mail without reading it,” she explains. “For marketers this means they can’t just do e-mail marketing and expect it to get them noticed. They must be the best at it in order to get consumers to value their messages.”
Being the best means innovating. And many experts point to the practice of “batch and blast” as endangering e-mail marketing innovators.
Big business is faulted by some economists and analysts as being short-sighted, focusing far too heavily on the short term and not enough on the long term. A similar criticism can be made of e-mail marketing practices, says Dave Lewis, vice president of market development at StrongMail Systems Inc.
“It’s so easy to dump 5 million messages using the e-mail medium. A retailer might do this because it needs to make a sales objective for the week and it knows a certain percentage of consumers will respond,” Lewis says. “Where that backfires, though, is while there will be some people who click through, enabling you to meet your sales objective, there also will be people who make decisions to unsubscribe or complain, or simply delete your e-mails. This affects your reputation and your ability to really reach customers.”
Too many marketers use e-mail in this way, as a broadcast medium, Lewis contends, and overlook narrower, customized, more effective uses of e-mail messages.
“You can send out 5 million messages, all the same, all at the same time. But the technology and the medium permit you to customize each message personally to a customer, relevant to their online behavior, all centered on your brand,” he says. “Marketers still see the Holy Grail as list size when it actually is the percentage of customers on your list who are engaged with your brand.”
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