The new email marketing: the leaky bucket

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 07, 2008

Email marketing is like trying to fill a bucket with holes in it. And email marketers fall into two schools of thought on how to do so.

The old school tackles the problem by using more water and pouring faster. It's inefficient and dooms you to a never-ending game of catch-up and costs. (And eventually you run out of water.)

The new school plugs the holes.

This is the first post in a series with the gloriously pretentious title "The new email marketing." Subsequent posts explore the tactics used by enlightened marketers to exploit email successfully, sustainably, ethically and efficiently.

The old email marketing is volume oriented.

At its worst, the old email marketing sees email addresses as a commodity. The thinking behind this quote (heard by me at a recent event):

"I just bought 4 million email addresses. They're not targeted, but...(shrug)"

The old email marketing is short-term.

It sees sending more of the same emails, more often, as the answer to falling response rates. Ken Magill likens it to an addiction: you need to send more and more to get the same buzz. And like any such addiction, the eventual outcome is not pretty.

The old email marketing falls prey to blinkered and narrow interests, letting their email program become hijacked by too many conflicting or inappropriate goals or approaches.

The new email marketing thinks smart email marketing, not bulk email marketing. Look out for part 2 soon...

Tags: email marketing, email strategy

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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