Is the email discussion list still relevant?

One email marketing tactic you hear little of is the email discussion list (definition). Back when Flickr was just a spelling mistake, discussion lists were an established online marketing tactic.

The list offered many benefits to its owners. For example:

• it built community (very Web 2.0)
• it provided a vehicle for ads, promotions and branding efforts
• it helped establish expertise and reputation

[Discussion lists also had marketing value for participants. Contributors could highlight their own expertise and build a reputation through useful posts, with email signatures promoting each author's business.]

All the big online marketing discussion lists I used to participate in have faded away. It seems people now prefer to interact on forums, blogs, social networks and similar.

Or do they?

Zappos is a poster child for online business success and customer service excellence. And they have a flourishing email discussion list: the Shoe Digest.

So is the discussion list still relevant? Here's my take...

People want meaningful interactions and simply seek out the vehicle and venue that allows that to happen most easily.

Email discussion lists suffer from the overload problem: there's a limit to how many discussion posts people will read through in their inbox, even in digest form.

So they migrate to forums and social networks, which are big enough and accessible enough to accommodate a large number of topics/discussions, while making it relatively easy for users to filter out those discussions they don't want to see.

However, email still has the age-old advantage that led to broadcast email initiatives in the first place: the messages go to the users, the users don't have to go to the messages.

To keep that benefit and overcome the overload problem, the best email discussion lists are now small, highly targeted lists, often invitation-only*. This keeps the signal-to-noise ratio high and the volume of posts under control.

So, for example, one model that might work well is a private discussion list for your most evangelical customers. Let them interact exclusively with each other and with your experts and executives.

Nobody talks about discussion lists anymore. What do you think: do they still have a place in the marketing toolbox or are they now just for collaborative groups without a commercial agenda?

*Zappos' list is large and public! The exception that proves the rule?

Tags: email marketing, discussion lists

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