Your email marketing culture challenge: direct response or digital facilitator? Or both?

Email is a victim of its own success.

Any self-respecting “why do email marketing?” article begins by referencing the excellent ROI. Then the list of benefits usually starts with email’s ability to garner immediate, direct and measurable responses.

You send an email, you get sales, downloads, registrations, donations etc…wahay! What’s not to like?

Direct response is still email marketing’s dominant culture. The tactics and technologies have come a long way, but most commercial email thinking is still, at heart, about driving immediate response.

But there are two other email marketing cultures struggling for a fair share of your attention.

The first is the idea of email as relationship and brand builder. Its origins lie in the lowly content newsletter: the monthly “useful tips and articles” email from your friendly B2B service provider.

Ten years ago I wrote that newsletters…

“…may also contain action-related elements, such as news of a special offer. But their greatest potential lies in their long-term value; in their ability to build, over time, a lasting relationship with subscribers.”

The second is email as digital facilitator: email that does not (just) drive immediate action through the email itself.

The digital facilitator plays an enabling role, supporting action expressed through other media and channels, connecting channels, driving communication and encouraging interaction…all the fuzzy, soft or banal stuff that sends some direct marketers running for the drinks cabinet.

Examples of this facilitator role might be:

• Distribution and promotion of user-generated content (like product reviews)
• Announcements of offline events
• Transactional messages, such as order confirmations or account updates
• Share-with-your-network (SWYN) links
• Encouraging participation at community sites and user forums
• Promoting other channels, like Twitter accounts or video

The challenge for marketers is to escape the confines of the direct response mindset and embrace all three cultures in their email marketing program.

Lesson 1: All email builds relationships and affects branding

The direct response culture can seduce senders into the “hear and now” trap, where it’s all about today’s email or, at best, a small sequence of emails.

Each message is a discrete invitation to buy, download, register…and is judged accordingly. How many sales, registrations, downloads did we get today?

But every email leaves an impression in the mind of the recipient.

Each additional email strengthens or softens, clarifies or confuses that impression…creating, changing or cementing an overall opinion of the sender and/or its brands, products and services.

This process is happening anyway, so it makes sense to account for it…even when your focus is on direct response.

There are two critical elements here:

1. The message container

The message container is the email’s design, layout, style, color, tone, personality…all of which should reflect the brand or image you want to project.

Apple’s emails, for example, might seek to sell products, but their design shows they are acutely aware of the brand image they need to mesh with.

Consider also emails that don’t display or function correctly in every email client. You can get away with a few broken emails in terms of response and ROI, but there’s a hidden cost in terms of the sender’s image and reputation.

2. The message itself

This is where the short-term direct response perspective can potentially do the most harm.

Discounted product offers are a great way of shifting (excess) inventory for a full-price luxury retailer. They work well on a one-off basis.

Continually sending such emails labels you as a discounter: there’s a disconnect between your desired brand or market position and how your email list now perceives that brand or market position.

Equally, a publisher whose email content differs from the website content may find perceptions drifting in a similar way.

It is right and proper to change email content / offers to match what you know gets a good response from your list or particular list segments. But you still need to consider the wider picture and implications. Not to mention the misleading wisdom of the minority.

(See also Building a list on more than deals and discounts).

Lesson 2: Social media didn’t kill direct marketing

Social media didn’t kill email. In fact, email as digital facilitator has received a huge boost from social media, with the concurrent movement toward interaction, exchange, sharing etc.

But all the excitement and attention around social media hasn’t suddenly made email ineffective as a direct response channel either. Email marketing’s high ROI may be based as much on the low costs as the good returns, but it’s still high.

Many commentators are quick to criticize those who don’t account for social media trends in their email marketing. But abandoning email as a driver of direct response would be a similar sin.

Shifts in email marketing culture aren’t about abandoning one approach for another, but combining the best elements of each.

Lesson 3: Take the leap of faith

The task is not to ignore email’s ability to drive response, but to account for the branding/image impacts and gradually bring in elements or messaging that play on email’s ability to facilitate responses elsewhere or in the future.

However, since we’ve been brought up on email’s ROI and measurability, there’s a big psychological barrier to using email to produce long-term or indirect benefits that are hard to measure.

As Derek Harding put it recently on the topic of one-to-one communication:

“E-mail still delivers such a high return on investment (ROI) from simple bulk messaging that many marketers see little need to do much else.”

Of course, such a leap of faith is a non-issue in many other channels where success metrics are hard to pin down: think of all the branding ads on TV.

The pull of measurability also loses some impact when you remember that the ways we’ve been measuring email marketing success are not nearly as accurate as we might think.

We can overcome our reluctance to embrace new roles for email by finding ways to properly evaluate the contribution of email to overall marketing and business success.

We can consider attribution models or mail/holdout tests, as recommended by Kevin Hillstrom in a recent interview on this blog.

These will likely reveal that email’s benefits come from those facilitator roles as much as direct response.

Equally, cultural change can go step-by-step. Evolution, not revolution: introducing additional (rather than replacement) email streams that serve engagement goals or building hybrid approaches that sell, engage, and facilitate in one.

In the retail world, for example, Chad White talks of an “age of quasi editorial content.”

You still want the sale, but you take a more indirect route to get it: drawing people in through editorials, reviews and short features. Advertorials rather than adverts.

These softer sell approaches need not be the focus of a message, but can act as secondary calls-to-action. Not only do they build engagement or interest, but they offer an alternative point of interaction to recipients who aren’t interested in the main offer or in responding right now.

It also works the other way, of course. For example, we already have facilitator emails that we can better exploit for marketing.

Loren McDonald, for example, lists a range of lifecycle and trigger messages that are informational or service-oriented (or can be pitched as such), but can include promotional elements too. 

It’s as simple as adding “related product” recommendations to a sidebar in your order confirmation emails.

We are limited only by our imagination and the constraints of an ingrained direct response culture.

Find related articles:

• Channel: Email marketing strategy

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