Aesop and email marketing denial: an essay

It was the Greek fable writer who penned the story about the boy and the jar of nuts. With so many nuts so tantalizingly close, the boy cried tears of frustration as his fat and full fist remained stuck in the jar.

So it is sometimes with email marketing. If only we could send more email to more addresses. But the permission jar has a narrow neck. If you get too greedy, you end up with nothing.

Send too much unwanted email and your delivery rates plummet as inbox guardians react to all the subsequent spam reports.

Still, the web is littered with well-meaning businesses who are in denial about their email practices.

Often deluded by an exaggerated sense of loyalty to our products and services, we simply cannot accept that not everybody wants to hear about the latest model, offer, customer acquisition etc.

So we drift away from the best practices, finding excuses to send more email to more addresses without regard for the recipients' perspective.

Unfortunately, while we can delude ourselves, we cannot put one over the ISPs who guard those inboxes. A point made by Return Path's J.D. Falk in an excellent and humorous blog post: How to Impress the ISPs.

As senders, we are being marked all the time. By recipients, by ISPs, by webmail services. As soon as we let standards slip, we are punished. By lower responses, spam reports and delivery blocks.

Perhaps we have become bamboozled by all the technology (useful and valuable though it is)...content to let the databases and automated tools do all the work. Seeing spreadsheet cells, not customers. Forgetting that the email that goes out needs to evoke a positive emotional response as well as a digital one that shows up on campaign reports.

Or forgetting that prospective subscribers to a list need to be persuaded of the value of relinquishing their precious email address. An issue highlighted earlier today by Melinda Krueger in a look at one company's email efforts.

And so perhaps there is value in looking back to the early days of email marketing, when pioneers like Michael Katz and Nick Usborne emphasized the role of personality and human relationships in engaging readers and cementing their loyalty to your business, brand and email program.

I like, for example, the concepts explored in the latest EmailLabs newsletter, where Stefan Pollard describes 10 ways to engage newsletter readers.

Or David Baker's list of email marketer roles, which includes "the Interpreter," responsible for creating and guarding the email experience...a topic which always deserves more exposure.

Web 2.0 never did manage to kill email. But it teaches the value of getting customers and prospects to interact and become part of a communication exchange. Email marketing does not operate in a technology vacuum.

Tags: email marketing, customer relationships

Permalink | October 16, 2007 | 0 comment(s)
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