Thank heavens for spam filters! We’d all be far worse off without them. I’d like to shake the hand of whoever invented them. Named after the Monty Python spam sketch, spam e-mailing has gone through various phases since the early 90s: irritating, then annoying, now largely ignorable using filters. You might think that, for marketers, e-mail spamming has somewhat undermined the effectiveness of e-mail as a medium for messages. But no, people still like e-mail and it remains as the bedrock of icommunications.
How good is it really for marketing? Well, there are many many software companies who will tell you about their wonderful products and how easy it is to get e-mails out to your prospects and customers that are beautifully targeted. All that is true of course, and e-mail marketing is huge. It is easy to set up, easy to operate and easy to measure so has been adopted by almost everyone.
But I would say it’s not whether you do it or not, it’s whether you can deliver value with it for your product. For B2B, there is no doubt that marketing messages via e-mail benefit from using the same medium as 99% of operational business communications today. When was the last time you got something in the post at work that was useful? Precisely.
So, what do effective marketing e-mails look like? Most software packages for e-mail marketing can create dynamic, colourful and eye-catching e-mails. Is that enough? When only a few percent open and click through is that enough? Do we accept the old DM argument that 0.15% is good and just flood millions of inboxes to get the numbers?
In my mind, if you’re going for steady state communications then use e-mails that are the same for all recipients. If you want growth then you have to tailor the content, and provide interaction (and not just clicking back to a website). Effective e-mail interaction means you actively encourage recipients to change the e-mail content to suit them, there and then. Think ‘website in my inbox’. In the not very distant future, e-mails that work like websites and behave like websites will be effective, others will be just a waste of your money.
Next time – self help customer service and why it’s really marketing, but don’t tell anyone.
