Email Marketing 2.0 is accountability

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on November 08, 2007

The comments on an earlier post about IP addresses brought up the issue of accountability.

Webster defines it as "an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions."

"Well, yeah," I hear you say..."we've always had to take responsibility for the results of our email efforts." But have we?

It wasn't long ago that email marketing was a slap happy affair. You sent your messages out. And if you didn't get it right, you still got enough of a response to pay the bills. No harm was done.

Today's Internet and today's Internet user give accountability unprecedented weight in email marketing.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the field of deliverability.

Webmail services have long empowered users to determine your delivery success by marking your emails as spam (or not.) Too many spam reports and you're on a blacklist. Users can hold you accountable for your actions.

But it doesn't stop there. Last week we learnt that this concept might extend to desktop email software, now that IMAP functionality is growing.

More importantly, one of the main thrusts of global anti-spam efforts is to develop standards and techniques that allow email services to reliably identify the sender of an email.

The spread of these authentication technologies will eventually mean that your emailing history is (and remains) closely tied to your domain.

There will be no escaping your past and present actions. You will be held increasingly accountable for your email practices.

In a recent roundtable on the future of email marketing, Tricia Robinson-Pridemore noted, "vendors can make sure the technology side of it is as optimal as possible, but they can't ensure delivery when you still have the variables the e-mail marketer is responsible for..."

But accountability goes beyond deliverability.

Today's email user is a fickle creature. The tolerance threshold for "poor" emails drops with each passing week. Users have alternatives. Not just your competitors' emails, but all the other choices for receiving offers and information.

Just this week, Hitwise reported how, for example... "for the first time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services."

Fail to meet ever increasing expectations and the user punishes you by ignoring your message. Or hurting your deliverability through spam reports. Or worse.

The Internet has always given customers a voice and an audience, but the reach of the disillusioned subscriber grows ever vaster. Thanks to the growth of blogs, social media and all the other ways individuals can speak to a wider world.

Once you accept the importance of accountability and the shift of power to the recipient, it changes your whole perspective.

Your focus moves away from meeting business needs to understanding how to match those needs with those of the recipient.

Email marketing becomes more relationship-focused. A recent article from ThinData, for example, emphasizes the role of building trust (with tips on how to do that) in driving successful email programs. A topic we've considered before.

You think more in terms of long-term customer experiences, holistic campaigns rather than a series of one-off promotions, targeting, relevancy, dynamic content, personalization, customization, trigger emails and all the other buzzwords that now really do mean something in a brave, new, accountable world.

And when you do that...it works.

Listrak, for example, just released a case study showing how various success metrics improved when email content was based on a recipient's previous purchase history.

The future is bright. But the future is in your hands.

Tags: email marketing, email deliverability, email accountability, anti-spam, spam, relationship marketing

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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