Advanced email marketing and a challenge to vendors

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on February 28, 2008

Derek Harding's latest article reminded me of some questions I once posed about some of the advanced email marketing practices out there. I'm still waiting for the answers.

Derek's article talks about the quality assurance challenges faced when using more sophisticated email tools, such as trigger emails, on-the-fly personalization, etc.

It's a polite way of saying it's easy to screw up when the technology is complicated. Much kudos to Derek for tweaking the nose of the breezy advanced email marketing utopia.

Email marketing still suffers from the gap between technological capabilities and implementation skills.

Consider, for example, that a recent survey of top UK retailers found that nearly half were not complying with local email marketing law.

Or read Stefan Pollard's incredulous review of all the things one organization-that-should-know-better is doing wrong with their emails.

There are two main reasons for the gap between best practices and actual practices.

The first is lack of awareness of the former among many marketers, a long-standing issue for which there is no easy solution.

But the second is the lack of time and resources. I can pick holes in my own email newsletter, most of which are simply due to not being able to afford the features and functionality I'd like.

So there's a challenge there to email marketing software manufacturers and services, especially those that (rightly) urge marketers to make better use of email:

1. Build systems that automate best practices and alert the user to problems

An issue I've raised before.

User interfaces could reject image tags without alt-text, alert you when a link only appears as an image (which might be blocked), etc. etc.

2. Build systems that are more usable

I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that the super technology out there barely gets used. Or if it does, not to its full potential.

Rather like we only use about 5% of our PC's features. (Mine is really just a clever electronic typewriter.)

I had a look behind the scenes at Campaigner recently (disclaimer: they're a sponsor) and was pleased to see the development of visual tools for more intuitive building of trigger email campaigns.

Before you guffaw about the bone-headed simplicity of recommending more usable software and services, consider why most of us still can't work a VCR or DVD recorder properly.

3. Make best practice features affordable

Yes, another obvious one. But the fact is that a lot of people would love subscriber preference centers and such like, but can't get them though the value-priced ESPs and can't afford the premium services.

Competition should naturally lead to this, as evidenced by the growing number of services offering integration with Google's web analytics service at no extra charge. Here's hoping anyway.

Service listings | Tags: email marketing services, email marketing software, trigger emails

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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