The one question to ask of your email marketing in 2010
Latest posts | By Mark Brownlow | 9 Comments | Licence this content
…and the question is a simple one: is it enough?
One of email marketing’s great strengths is (or was) its robustness. It was relatively easy to get a campaign or newsletter to justify the efforts that went into it.
You could often make “mistakes” and still get a good return on your time and resources.
And that mentality still pervades much of the email marketing world. Never mind that good returns hide the fact that many (most) people don’t actually respond to what we send.
Each year, various people warn against this complacency, suggesting that what was good enough before won’t be good enough for the future. And each year we largely ignore the warnings because the same emails still do the business.
Will this year be different?
Check this graph:
The green line is what most people do in email marketing. Minor improvements over time to the quality of their campaigns and newsletters.
The red line is the failure line, representing a minimum level of quality that still allows success. It’s going up as well, for reasons I’ll come to.
Most of us sit on the left-hand side of the graph. Our green line is higher than the red line. What we do is better than what you can get away with.
But at some point, if you keep doing more or less the same thing, the green line will dip below the red line…panic. This is what those warnings about complacency are about.
Most us haven’t hit that point yet. Which is why we maybe tire of seeing those warnings. But my intuition tells me that we’re all a lot closer to the red line than we think we are.
Why? Why now more than ever before?
Here my reasons…
1. Accelerating diversification of ways to communicate
A few years ago, if you wanted to keep up with new things at a website, you signed up to its email list. It was that or keep popping by every few days to manual check for yourself.
Today you have feeds (blogs), Twitter updates, mobile messaging and other ways of staying in touch. And even more ways of just communicating online. If anything, this diversification of media and channels is accelerating.
Attention is spread thinner, so you have to stand out more if you want your share.
2. Growing email competition
Competition in the inbox is still growing. Possibly faster than ever before.
First, social networks are, ironically, a new and big source of email. Morgan Stewart quotes a Hotmail product manager, who said:
“15-20% of email received at Hotmail is social media notifications”
Second, the economic woes of 2008/2009 led to an upsurge in interest in more cost-efficient, measurable and accountable ways of spending marketing cash. Enter email, waving a very large flag. Pauper to prince in a matter of months.
The result: more organizations sending more email. I see the stats that come out of the UK DMA’s national email benchmarking surveys and the volume of email sent via ESPs is hitting all-time highs again.
Many of those organizations are working hard to improve the quality of their emails. Meaning more competition and better competition than ever before.
3. Changing consumer expectations
With choice comes selectivity. Anybody want to deny that we consumers are more demanding than ever before?
The rise of social media both reflects and drives growing end-user empowerment that conditions us to expect more personal and valuable communication from organizations.
Email is not immune to that trend.
4. More diversity in display environments
Until relatively recently, nearly all email was read on a desktop. Despite the limitations of certain clients, the viewing context for emails was largely a known factor. Not any more.
The last year or two has seen massive growth in alternative viewing environments for email, most notably via smartphones and netbooks. Only yesterday we added another to the list: the iPad.
This isn’t just about design, it’s also about behavior. How does “mobile” functionality impact the way people use and respond to email messages?
5. Recent changes to the deliverability landscape
For the last few weeks and months, various people close to the process of managing and filtering incoming emails have been warning that “legitimate” senders and sources of bulk email are likely to face more rigorous control.
A related development is the intended (and to some extent implemented) move to relying more on how recipients interact with your emails to decide if those emails are worthy of delivery.
The kind of low response that still drives positive ROI may eventually not be enough to convince ISPs of your email’s value, leading to future problems with getting email delivered to the inbox.
In summary: I think the red line, the quality bar, isn’t a bar at all. It’s curving upwards this year. Is it, perhaps, finally time to heed those warnings?
Why wouldn’t you want to get better?
Of course, the convergence of those red and green lines isn’t the real reason to look to improve our emails. As Loren McDonald recently wrote:
“What worked a few years ago might not be irretrievably broken in 2010, but it’s probably not generating the level of returns that it could.”
The argument is a simple one: better emails generate better returns?
How do you improve your emails? The information is out there.
Related post: The slow death of your email (and how to stop it)
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9 comments on “The one question to ask of your email marketing in 2010”
Thanks for very clear and interesting article.
It is indeed still amaizing to see marketers agree to the fact that they should do things differently… and actualy don't change anything while their results are still getting worth and worth.
The question is then : why marketers don't do what they believe should be good for them ?
This question itself seems insane… doesn't it ?
I guess the first answer is that they don't "really believe" it is better for them.
Let's face it, eventhough emailing is easy it still requires lot of knowledge (technical and email marketing) and ressources to put in place a real effective email program. Most of the time marketers miss both of them.
A second answer would be that we need to demonstrate things rather than stating that the marketers will gain this or this. And to do so we need to work on a step by step basis and demonstrate for each step what is really gained (i.e : setting up a welcome pack is not that demanding and it brings great results… furthermore once in place it is completely automated so it doesn't require further ressources).
One last point I see here is that marketers don't segment their database :
They compare their email campaign results to benchmarks.
For instance let's say an average open rate (benchmark information) is 20%. If a marketer see that its campaign has an open rate of 22% he will then state that his emailing program is over performing and then why should he change anything about it.
This being said, benchmark from year to year show that the results are getting lower and lower and so a marketer with lower and lower results is still aligned with the benchmark… why should he worry ?
First : benchmark studies give a macro vision and mix results from very different type of campaign and avdertiser practices. It is not relevant figures !
Second : marketers doing this forget a main (maybe the most) important thing in direct marketing – all their contact in their database are not reacting the same way.
A quick study based on the email activity of the different contacts in a marketer database demonstrate that some contacts have never been reactive to the program. This automatically lower the overall results.
To make it quick, marketers MUST look deeper into their campaign results to have a real idea and control of their email program.
Of course, this is my very personal vision of the market today.
Frédéric Testard
Thank you Frédéric for such a thoughtful response.
The lack of resources is a big issue. One thing that came out of the UK DMA national client survey was that many marketers were indeed aware of the need to improve, but lacked the resources to do so.
Part of your solution (to demonstrate the value of improvements) would also help there, since it would enable marketers to argue for more resources from senior executives and bank managers.
This is also why I put together the post on segmentation, collating case studies and surveys identifying the concrete benefits in terms of better responses. Your generous comment encourages me to think I should repeat the concept for other areas, like the welcome message.
Thanks again for taking the time to make such valuable points!
Thank you for all the great posts from last year! I look forward to reading your blog, because they are always full of information that I can put to use. Thank you again, and God bless you in 2010.
How interesting !
Thanks for that particulary accurate article.
I do believe that the way "we" (consumers) are using emails will evolve a lot in 2010, 2011. And I'm also convinced that most of "us" (email marketers) won't see the turning point or won't be able to fit correctly consumers' needs / uses.
As you rightly point, social networking has (and will have, more and more) important consequences on the email market. Not only because of the % of administrative messages generated on our mailbox, but because it changes the intrinsic purpose of the email. Email tends to become a simple link to access to the message, and not a message itself.
Technical innovations such as Google Wave may turn upside down our way of communicating. Maybe this is not for tomorrow… but let's imagine the day after, and conclude this comment by saying that email marketers will have to evolve too… or slowly agonize !
Vincent I completely agree. It's hard to say what exactly will change, but I'm very certain that things will change. Like you say, success is about continuous evolution. Staying still is going backwards.
Mark,
I am falling in love with this blog. I think this post might have done it with the professional graph, but I'd guess it's because I usually have the same opinion as you. I have been asking if this is enough for a while now too. With all of the buzz around about SMM and Email marketing, I am not convinced that they are self supporting marketing tools. I think that is a no-brainer, but many companies are resorting to that move. Thanks for the post.
PP, that graph uses state-of-the-art pen and ink technology. Can't beat it.
As I read this article, I couldn't help but think about the Social Media Revolution video (Socialnomics).
The stats in there were overwhelming…but the one thing that stood out to me was the decrease in the use of email as a means of communication (I think it was said that BU no longer even assigns email addresses to incoming students).
Lots to think about.
Hi Jack,
Yep, although recent studies show that the more people use social media, the more they actually use email. See, for example, the research cited at EmailisnotDead.com (biased site, mind, since I built it).