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Gauging the Right Time to Test E-mail Marketing
By Don Lange
Direct Marketing News
October 2002 — If you have ever shaken your head and laughed when responding to the question "when is the best time to have kids" one thing is certain. You're a parent.For all you non-parents the answer to the question is - there is no good time. If people had the luxury of getting all their ducks in a row before propagating - (House? Check. Career? Check. University plan? Check. Teddy Bear Wallpaper in fully equipped baby room? Check.) - we would live in a pretty boring world.
Believe it or not this does relate to email marketing in a way. There are many traditional direct response companies who are sitting back and waiting for just the right time and just the right conditions before pursuing an acquisition email strategy. There seems to be a few basic reasons why companies are waiting.
They are afraid of being labeled as spammers
As reasons go this is a good one. There is nothing more daunting to companies than having recipients of their email flame up and fire back a spam accusation. For traditional postal direct marketers who have heard the horror stories this is reason enough to completely avoid adding email into the acquisition mix. This is especially true when reviewing many of the lists that are made available for email list rental.For example, the typical co-op email list consisting of hundreds of website sign-ups is hardly comforting to postal marketers who have an intimate knowledge and understanding of how the best lists are byproducts of strong relationships between list owners and customers. A lot of email lists on the market have facilitators instead of recognizable owners.
Luckily, the email list market in Canada is expanding and more and more traditional list owners are making their email lists available for rental. Virtually all of these lists have adopted a permission marketing technique and ensured that customers have been provided either an opportunity to opt in or opt out of receiving 3 rd party offers. But more importantly the people who are on these lists actually recognize the source identified on the emails as a company they have a relationship with (for example as a subscriber to a particular magazine). This recognition is worth much more than a double or triple opt-in.
Your list broker should provide a clear picture on exactly how lists have been compiled. It is always better to rent a list where there are established relationships and where a motivated list owner will immediately get involved when one of its customers cries spam.
They have not figured out their own email retention strategy
Retention strategy basically means one or ideally both of two things. One is you will continue to buy from me. Two is you will buy more from me than you do now.A lot of organizations with email addresses salivate at the prospect of having an incredible tool like email at their disposal.
Having emails are one thing, knowing what to do with them is quite another. Striking the right balance between providing good customer service and cross–sell opportunities with over-saturating a customer is a tricky business when one click obligates you to cease and desist.
Calling in web consultants doesn't help because they immediately advise anyone who listens that everybody wants a daily email newsletter. That of course can create a crisis of content as most organizations realize in a hurry that email newsletters cannot just be a few lines of text or a folksy note from the editor.
Content-rich organizations notwithstanding, what companies really want is to leverage the communication channel to either complement postal mail or replace it all together. Invoicing, renewal campaigns and friendly reminders of upcoming sales or new product innovations is the interaction that most executives want.
Once again, wanting and executing are two very disparate parameters. The result is that many companies have continued to sit on the fence with respect to how they are going to communicate with existing customers by email.
And with no defined online retention strategy, it seems a bit foolhardy to adopt an online acquisition strategy.
Of course a lot of the fence sitting is a result of another common reason why companies are waiting.
They do not know (or necessarily trust) the players in the
vendor chain
Despite the fact that the principals of postal direct response marketing applies to online marketing there are enough technical and web-cultural differences to give traditional marketers pause. Some of the players in the vendor chain are familiar – for example there are creative and strategic agencies, list managers and list brokers. Some notably absent suppliers in email marketing are printers, traditional merge purge houses, lettershops and Canada Post.
The email deployment house has replaced a good portion of the vendor chain. However, not all deployment houses are created equal. Many of them are ASP modules that put a lot of the database knowledge onus on the user. This means that more sophisticated ways of detecting duplications and reacting quickly to bounceback and removal issues are left to so-called built-in safeguards.
When your database management company is also your email deployment house there are considerable advantages. Following standard merge practices that look at multiple match codes and using the data to pre-populate forms goes a long way to ensuring a clean list and a convenient experience for prospects.
Many of the vendors that first arose with the email revolution understood the web but not direct marketing. These vendors grew astronomically during the dot-com revolution. However, a glance at the stock pages will give any marketer pause in trusting the long-term health of these organizations that are dedicated solely to the web.There are many factors that companies need to weigh before proceeding into email acquisition strategies. The good news for many direct response marketers is that there has been a tremendous growth in understanding amongst the web community that the tried and true direct marketing principals need to apply online. The result is the best web vendor companies are learning about direct marketing and the best direct response vendor companies are learning about web marketing.
With these kinds of industry safety nets being fashioned the best time to leap is right now.
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