The new email marketing: embracing Web 2.0

Part 14 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.]

It's hard to spend more than five minutes on a media website without discovering new concepts and tools for people and businesses to communicate with each other.

Facebook, MySpace, feeds, microblogging, IM, Twitter, Plurk, Plaxo, Ning...

Quick! Get a Facebook strategy in place if you want to avoid embarrassment at the big interweb party.

What's the new email marketer to do?

Flee? Rejoice? Both? Neither?

Despite want pundits might say and we might want, there are no simple answers to how email marketing should embrace (or not) social networks and other Web 2.0 developments.

But there are concepts and approaches that help us find the answers for our own unique situations...

1. All that glitters is not gold

Journalists focus on what's new, not necessarily what works. And a lot of "media" today is written by people with an agenda: vendors interested in spreading a story that fits nicely with the products and services they sell.

Don't jump into a new tool just because it makes you look good to your peers and a media who likes to talk about new things that might work, rather than old things that do work.

The new email marketers asks, "Will the tool help me reach and convert customers and prospects more effectively and efficiently than in the past?"

That's what counts. (Testing is allowed.)

2. You are not married to email

The new email marketer does not market using email. The new email marketer drives sales, opinion, web visits, downloads, registrations, ad views, ad sales, donations, or whatever else defines success for the organization. For which they happen to use email.

If there is a more effective way to use your marketing resources, then use it. As far as Web 2.0 goes, take Anna Billstrom's simple and sensible, yet often overlooked, advice:

"Find out where your customers are online and what social media they are using."

A message echoed in recent research by ESP ExactTarget on how to reach the right consumer.

3. Keep your head firmly out of the sand

A great advantage of email is its ubiquity. Everyone has an email address. It is the world's social network. Email is immortal.

But...

The fact that Facebook sends out alerts by email doesn't necessarily help my retail email strategy. A gripe I raised a year ago.

Yes, email survives. More email is sent. But that's not the critical point. What is critical is that the email audience and email user habits evolve, especially under the accelerating influence of Web 2.0 technologies.

So the new email marketer is flexible: revising strategies in the light of changes in audience composition and behavior. Seeking synergies. Looking for opportunities.

4. One thing has not changed

All these new tools and technologies, like email itself, are conduits for content. Not an end in themselves.

It is not enough to email. It is not enough to twitter. It is not enough to blog. It is not enough to have a Facebook page.

What you say, what you send, what you communicate still has to have value. In that sense nothing has changed since the day they printed the first newspaper.

Here's the new/old marketing mantra:

"Produce material people will be glad they saw or read."

Greg Cangialosi's agrees in his take on Marketing 2.0, where he says:

"...this isn't a game for being just the sizzle, you have to be the steak at the same time, almost all of the time."

5. Know your limitations

It's hard to be everywhere all the time. The growing fragmentation of communication channels causes us to spread our resources ever thinner. At the cost of the quality and value we need to communicate to make each channel work.

My feed reader is littered with the carcasses of bright new email marketing blogs that started well, slowed and died as soon as the novelty value wore off.

Only invest in channels used by your audience where you know you can provide that quality and value that earns you the necessary attention and response.

6. Web 2.0 is bottom-up

Anna Billstrom again in a comment on her own post:

"If more of our messaging could be transactional, more one-to-one conversation with the customer base (as a corporate or business entity) that's a good thing."

The growth of Web 2.0 both reflects and encourages the return to relationships that started this whole series off.

Web 2.0 is notification that we need to work against what Seth Godin calls the first law of mass media:

"Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter."

Web 2.0 is a reminder that there is an empowered human at the other end of the message.

7. Same content? Unique content?

Each tool or channel has its own nuances. And the customers using your web feeds are likely different to those preferring email. Or Twitter. Or those reading your Facebook page.

This is where the real adventure starts. Can you, for instance, repurpose content from one tool or channel for the other? Both Chad White and Linda Bustos, for example, recently explored how customer reviews and email can complement each other.

Numerous other articles address promising ways to get email to benefit from and contribute to Web 2.0 tools and concepts.

But the top tactics will only emerge later, when you know exactly how people interact with your marketing messages. We know about multichannel shoppers. Do we now have ever-more multichannel communicators?

Email marketers are conscious of the dangers of email overload. Will there be issues of message duplication and overload if people "follow" you via email, Twitter, web feed and Facebook? Do the concepts of email fatigue transfer to a wider mix of communication tools and channels?

Web 2.0 is not a threat to the new email marketer. But it is a reminder that email marketing and email marketers need to evolve with email. To remain flexible and focused on producing value to those on the other end of the marketing message. Wherever they may be.

(Your thoughts and opinions are very welcome: this is largely unexplored territory, where theory still has the upper hand over experience.)

Tags: social media, social networks, facebook, myspace, twitter, blogging, email marketing, email strategy

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