The new email marketing: quality first, quantity second

Latest posts | Feed | By Mark Brownlow on May 23, 2008

Part 4 of an ongoing series:

(We're looking at the strategies and tactics that distinguish a smart email marketer from a bulk email marketer. See the New Email Marketing index page to access the rest of the series.)

Seen from afar, email marketing is a boiling mass of mediocre email programs all scrabbling to send more offers more often to more and more (and more) subscribers. Like some insatiable digital beast.

The beast needs slaying.

There are two challenges for marketers. First, your email competition is everywhere. You are always a mere moment away from your subscriber abandoning you for the next email in the (in)box.

And this subscriber is getting harder to please by the day.

Second, there's a bigger downside to bad email marketing than just wasted expense. Emails guide perceptions of your brand and business. Bad email...bad brand...bad business.

And let's not forget those consumers happily condemning poor commercial email to "report spam" purgatory, like Roman Emperors at the Colosseum. Thumbs up...you live to send email another day. Thumbs down and you may never be seen again.

Quality is the answer.

But that's like saying, you need to fish better if you want to catch more fish. Not very helpful.

What does quality mean in the new email marketing?

If we go back to our maelstrom of mediocrity, quality applies at the three pressure points: what you send, when you send it and who you send it to.

Sending high-value content or relevant offers.

Sending them often enough to keep folk engaged and responsive, but not so often that they get overwhelmed and unresponsive.

Sending not to anybody, but only to those whose needs and interests correspond with what you offer.

But if you want to really distinguish yourself from mediocrity, attract loyalty, get responses and improve all the other factors that contribute to success, then quality means...

"it is better to have a lot of appeal to some people
than some appeal to a lot of people."

Few email programs can have mass appeal to a mass audience. Yet we often design the whole program assuming this to be the case.

You don't want, for example, subscribers. You want the right kind of subscribers: active, responsive, engaged, interested, loyal ones. Quality, not quantity.

The selection process begins with sign-up, where you ensure prospective recipients know what to expect from you, so their expectations match, mirror and are met by what you actually do in terms of email content and frequency.

Once on board, your actual campaigns nurture the subscriber through time, binding them tighter and tighter to your program.

There are three aspects to this.

First, new email marketing does all those things everyone in the industry writes about all the time: send relevant, targeted content.

This message tends to get ignored through over-familiarity and a belief that relevancy and targeting can only be achieved through clever (and expensive) database and segmentation technologies.

Not so, as these posts explain:

Simpler ways to achieve relevancy in emails
Targeting good, prevaricating bad
Targeting too difficult? Start simple - it works

(Although more complex approaches are of course interesting for those with the skills and resources. See Anna Billstrom's article for some examples.)

Second, if you want influence with a few rather than ignorance from the majority, then you have to actively strive not to please all the people all the time.

That's not the same thing as targeting and segmentation. It's an invite to try to be a little different at the "risk" of only appealing to a smaller group of people. But it's not really a risk. Because if you're not different, you're stuck in a morass of competition.

It's an invite, in particular, for content publishers to develop a unique voice or standpoint. A personality.

Third, it means you need to keep your list free of non-responsive addresses. The new email marketing does not send email to those addresses which are technically or emotionally dead.

Technically dead addresses are those unable to receive email. All that goes into bounce management.

Emotionally dead are those addresses technically able to accept emails, but that don't ever respond to messages. We'll look at that issue more closely later in the series.

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]
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