Comments on: Why is email marketing so damn unsexy…?

By: James Duthie

James Duthie — Tue, 27 May 2008 12:19:10 +0000

Thanks for the detailed insight Morgan. I’ve done (and still do) a lot of email marketing so I can appreciate all of your points. Indeed, they’re often exactly what I preach to our clients. Good email marketing starts and ends with data. Data drives customer profiling, which in turn drives message relevance. And of course, the data at the end of the cycle (clicks, sales etc) facilitates testing and ongoing optimisation.

By: Morgan

Morgan — Fri, 23 May 2008 04:59:29 +0000

Interesting post. Thank you. I come from the email marketing world. Working both from a strategy and deliverability perspective at a major ESP. Email isnt going anywhere. Its earned its place in the marketing mix like you mentioned in the post. But even long time email marketers miss the boat when it comes to actually optimizing their email marketing campaigns and segmentation. Its all about data integration, deliverability optimization, better segmentation, and target marketing. Long gone are the days of blasting one message out to your list. You must build rich customer profiles leveraging customer, marketing interaction, and sales data to drive relevancy. Then you must think about how your mail is being treated to the receiving community ( the ISPs and domains you are sending to). You must manage your brand and the reputation tied to the IP address(s) you are mailing from. If your list(s) are full of dead email addresses, spam traps, and people who are marking your email as spam you are going to run into troubles. And getting blocked at a big ISP like AOL, Hotmail, or Yahoo means you are leaving a lot of money on the table.

Its important to optimize what you are doing with email and integrate it with the other channels (mobile, web analytics, social media, website, SEO, etc) to really drive conversions, improved response rates, and sales.

By: James Duthie

James Duthie — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 22:29:52 +0000

Thanks for the detailed insight Lucio. I agree and disagree with you at the same time

While SEO execution is tactical in nature, I still think there is a strategic element to it. Choosing your keywords, researching the market and developing a subsequent SEO plan is a strategic exercise.

Conversely, while email marketing should be a strategic process, most organisations use it tactically to achieve internal and isolated goals. I’d argue that few organisations see email as more than a sales channel. And very few embrace the strategic opportunity of developing customer relationships via email.

Your last sentence struck a chord with me:

‘It appears that marketers still have plenty of time to do it (email) over, but not nearly enough time to do it right.’

Spot on!

By: Lucio

Lucio — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:34:22 +0000

James, good topic here.
I can see some reasons.
Even that SEO theres a lot of intelligence theres lots of hands on. In other hand the truly art of email marketing is more about strategy than hands on (try to google - SEO strategies and Email marketing strategies)
SEO is aquisition and Email marketing is relationship (of course it can be used as aquisition).
Unfortunately the online world is taken for short time and poor management,
Also RSS can’t come a moment too soon. It’s become more and more clear over the last five years that email is simultaneously too powerful (people who read it jump) and too weak (spammers have trained us not to read it) to last for much longer.
It appears that marketers still have plenty of time to do it over, but not nearly enough time to do it right.