Why do we need Email Marketing?
Email Interview | Mark Brownlow
Mark Brownlow: I’ve spent the last 12 years doing or writing about email marketing. My goal is simply to help people get better results from their marketing email, both by implementing best practices and challenging established opinion.
I’m fortunate in having no boss, hidden agenda or product/service to sell other than my writing, so can offer an objective opinion unclouded by vendor bias.
In essence, email gives you a direct conduit into one of the most important and private pieces of online real estate: the inbox. That is both an opportunity and a responsibility.
Email can drive direct response (sales, downloads, registrations, donations, pageviews etc.), it can drive indirect responses (getting people to offline events), it can grow relationships, loyalty and trust (by delivering value to the recipient) and it can help build, reinforce or establish a brand or image.
At the same time, the inbox is a protected and valued part of an individual’s online life. So email marketers have a duty to respect the privacy and wishes of those they send email to…a need to uphold the tenets of permission-based marketing.
You need email marketing as a discipline even if your organization is not practicing what we understand as traditional email marketing. Every modern organization uses email, and every email leaves an impression on the recipient. So every email is, effectively, a marketing email too.
So even before we get into exploiting the formal marketing benefits of email, we need to understand that such things as order confirmations or the lowly signature that gets tagged onto your one-to-one conversational emails are also “marketing”.
Then we can add in the benefits outlined earlier…remembering particularly that you can get a foothold on the email marketing ladder with relatively little investment. That’s not the same as suggesting email marketing is cheap or easy, but it’s certainly cheaper than most alternatives.
Finally, we shouldn’t forget that people actually want our offers or content. Online surveys tell us that many people prefer email as the channel for receiving such information: that’s why they sign up to your list. In that sense, we need email marketing because that’s what our customers want, too.
The idea of email as a brand builder has been around a long time, but has never really got the acknowledgment it deserves. We’ve kind of got hooked into the idea of email as driving a distinct and immediate response: buy this, download this, go here, print this.
As such, it’s hard for people to give due attention to the “softer” branding, awareness and image building aspects of the medium. This is often relegated to simply ensuring the email’s design and copy somehow reflects the wider brand image.
This is changing. B2B companies, in particular, have always recognized the power of content-based newsletters to build loyalty, stay top of mind, and position themselves as problem solvers, thought leaders or sources of expertise.
Consumer brands are now starting to follow this model, or integrate it with more traditional direct-response approaches. But it’s hard for them to look beyond the “direct response” mentality, when that mentality has been so successful in the past.
An agent for change here is the growth of social media, which is forcing organizations to think more in terms of relationships, interaction and how email may fit into a more holistic marketing whole.
There’s a balance to be struck. It’s no good just diving in, but it’s no good holding off until you have everything in place for a super-sized “perfect” email marketing strategy.
At the very least you need to first develop an email strategy that has some quick and easy wins to start you off, but allows you to build out and develop a more sophisticated program as time, resources and skills allow.
If you don’t want to get in outside help to flesh out such a strategy, I can recommend a series of articles by Jeanne Jennings on the topic.
It’s important here to get input from across the organization. Since email may go out from different departments and email can play a role in driving success for different departments (customer service, event managers, sales managers etc.), they all need to be involved in the discussion process.
First, ensure you’re recognized…that people can pick you out in the inbox. The value of an email is near zero if nobody actually looks at it.
That means you need to “brand” the from line and possibly even the subject line. And ensure the top left of your email has brand recognition elements in it (logos or text). That’s because this is the part of the email that’s most often displayed in preview panes used by Outlook and others.
Second, since every email has an impact, it’s important to understand what email is leaving your organization. What form does it take? How much email is any one customer getting from different sources within the organization? What image or messages are coming across as a result of this mix?
It’s time to get a grasp of the wider email picture, so you can begin to harmonize and manage it.
Third, develop (or buy in) expertise with email design.
Your carefully-crafted design and copy might have the opposite impact to the one intended if it ends up looking like a pig’s ear in the recipient’s inbox.
What looks good on your screen in the office may look awful in one of the numerous different email software or webmail clients out there. Your design needs to be robust enough to degrade gracefully when it encounters a particularly idiosyncratic bit of email software or an email-unfriendly mobile device. Email design is not website design.
It’s hard to predict the evolution of email marketing, given how quickly things change online, but…
First, the quality bar always rises. People have more choice online than ever before. And higher expectations. So there is no excuse to ever assume that what worked so well before is going to work so well in the future. You have to keep trying to improve the value you deliver to your list. The key here is data: collecting the right data and then using it to deliver (and reap) more value.
Second, the growth of social media reflects and reinforces the need for more engaging, personal messaging. Email will not be immune to that trend and will increasingly become part of a wider whole that integrates messaging across a variety of channels and media.
Third, with all that choice, people gravitate to sources they can trust. So you need to build that trust with your email. Which means no abuse of permission, delivering value, meaningful interaction etc.
In a sense, nothing changes. Quality, trust, value etc. have always been goals, just more so now than ever before.
Mark Brownlow | Email Marketing Reports
Web: email-marketing-reports.com
Twitter: twitter.com/MarkatEMR
