Alive and Kicking: Execs Agree that E-mail DM is Sound

If you ever want to rankle e-mail marketers, ask them if e-mail is dead or soon will be.

This is one of the questions we asked five industry luminaries in a series of one-on-one interviews. It should be noted that about the only thing they all agreed on is that e-mail's most definitely not dead.

Participants in this year's e-mail roundtable were Matt Blumberg, deliverability company Return Path's CEO; John Rizzi, e-mail service provider e-Dialog's CEO; Mike Hilts, ESP Yesmail's president and general manager, Bill Nussey, ESP Silverpop's CEO; and Michelle Eichner, deliverability firm Pivotal Veracity's COO.

DIRECT: There's been a lot of talk about the so-called death of e-mail in this industry. What are your thoughts on this?

BLUMBERG: Like many ridiculous rumors, this one is based in part on fact. It's definitely true that the Internet generation doesn't use e-mail as much as older generations. But they still use it. We work with a lot of social networking sites that struggle with deliverability issues because so much of their business is run on e-mail. We like to say that a lot of Web 2.0 is powered by e-mail. Bottom line: E-mail isn't going anywhere.

RIZZI: That comment is so two years ago! On the contrary, e-mail is now mission-critical for most companies. Marketing budgets are shrinking, but e-mail budgets are holding stable or even growing in some instances. That's because e-mail is the only medium that has the potential to be a true one-to-one communication. Plus, it's highly measurable, so direct marketers know exactly which offers resonate with consumers and where to put their marketing dollars. And e-mail has a shorter development and deployment cycle than other media, which allows DMers to turn on a dime and react to changes in the market.

HILTS: E-mail is not dead. However, it is on a fatal path. The volume of commercial e-mail is growing at an alarming rate and can't continue. E-mail is an effective way to communicate and interact with customers. Unfortunately, it's still viewed and used primarily as a push-communication solution. E-mail's real value is in its interactive communication capabilities. I believe marketers will embrace this aspect more in the coming years and move away from the mass mailing capability of e-mail and more toward its customer-interaction and dialogue capabilities.

EICHNER: E-mail has gone through massive changes in less than a decade but it is far from dead. Thanks to a decrease in the cost of devices such as smart phones, e-mail exists on several planes: the Web, desktop and handheld devices. To really understand this, marketers need to drop the term ‘e-mail’ and begin to focus on digital messaging. The future of e-mail is multiplicity and with the advent and use of video there's no limit to where it can go.

DIRECT: What's the one thing DMers must stop doing with e-mail?

NUSSEY: In a tough economy, e-mail's timeliness and cost advantages are more appealing than ever. Unfortunately, many companies, particularly retailers, are using the channel too much right now. In fact, I've never heard more complaints from consumers about the volume of e-mail they're receiving these days. Otherwise loyal customers are getting turned off to good brands as more and more messages flood their inboxes.

BLUMBERG: Here are three that drive us crazy: First, not fixing the root causes of deliverability failure, but trying repeatedly to patch symptoms and demanding that ISPs ‘just lift the block.’ Second, not removing unsubscribe requests prior to the next mailing. It may be legal, but it's a lousy subscriber experience and a big ding on your brand. And third, keeping non-responders on the file. If they've been ignoring your messages for a year, they're not engaged. Dump them and focus on the subscribers who can help you drive your business. At the very least, send them a credible win-back campaign.

HILTS: One thing DMers miss the mark on time and time again is creative and content. They dilute an e-mail's call to action with noise and they try to sell you in the e-mail itself and even in the subject line. Remember the old job-seeking advice: The purpose of the resume is to get you the interview, not the job. In e-mail marketing, the purpose of the subject line is to get you to open the e-mail. The purpose of the e-mail is to get you to take action.

EICHNER: Direct marketers need to set a cutoff on inactive e-mail addresses. Attempting to include every name in your database in a given campaign is sure to cause deliverability issues and actually decrease ROI. By removing the lowest performing 1% to 5% of an e-mail list, DMers can boost ROI because they're bound to decrease overall complaints, hard bounces and other forms of non-delivery — all of which affect a campaign's overall performance.

RIZZI: Stop shortchanging it. E-mail has the potential to achieve one-to-one communications, but all too often we see companies putting short-term revenue hits ahead of long-term relationship gains. So instead of broadcasting, segment and send targeted messages to specific groups of your audience. And stop thinking only about the next promotion; develop your goodwill messaging strategy and focus on building the relationship.

DIRECT: How can marketers determine if their e-mail programs are relevant to recipients?

NUSSEY: DMers need to move beyond looking at their recipients as a homogeneous audience. Increased levels of personalization, time-based targeting and multi-channel campaigns raise the opportunity for marketers to answer a new and far more powerful question: Why was a campaign relevant to a particular recipient? The promise is to move e-mail beyond its roots as a mass-marketing channel into a truly one-to-one dialogue-based medium.

BLUMBERG: Subscribers actually give us a lot of feedback about whether or not our efforts are valuable to them. But you have to look past opens and clicks. How many subscribers opt out after just one or two messages? How many subscribers complain within a month of signing up for your messages? How much of a boost in response do you get when you send a targeted message vs. a generic, one-size-fits-all blast?

EICHNER: E-mail relevance should incorporate open rates, conversion rates, unsubscribe rates and complaint rates. Knowing how many sales you made from a given campaign is a good start, but it's only the beginning. The time has come to be introspective. Review how long it is, on average, before subscribers unsubscribe and identify where in the e-mail cycle users unsubscribe. Work on adapting your messaging strategy in order to extend a user's life span, or change that strategy to mitigate the loss of active users because of things like list fatigue.

DIRECT: In your opinion, what's the one metric that gets the least attention from senders and deserves more, and why?

NUSSEY: The single most overlooked characteristic of e-mail marketing is the time element. Most marketers send communications on schedules that largely are based on their internal work flows and approval cycles. And they continue the debate over which days of the week and times of day are best to send to a list. All of this misses the most obvious and powerful opportunity for relevance that exists — what day of the week and which time of day is best for each individual recipient? Measuring when each one interacts with their e-mail and using that data to calculate the best time to trigger each individual's message has the promise of increasing response rates more than deliverability, dynamic content or even behavioral targeting.

RIZZI: Not surprisingly, it's about money. Create a simple metric, like revenue generated per e-mail sent, which tells you if your e-mail is working. Track that over time and it'll show you the trend of your e-mail marketing performance.

BLUMBERG: Without question, marketers don't pay enough attention to complaint rates. Measuring this metric would help both deliverability and response. Because if subscribers are complaining, they sure aren't responding. And the complaint rate can tell you just so much. High complaints and low response? Well, you've got an e-mail that no one wants. High complaints and high response? There's a segmentation problem. Keep sending to clickers and send something else to everyone else. Digging into your complaint rate is the fastest path to higher inbox placement rates and higher response.

HILTS: I believe we're selling the many creative ways click-metrics can be exploited. Link scoring is one example. Link scoring is where you assign values to links within an e-mail. Your primary call-to-action links, also called your primary objective links, are assigned the highest value. The highest possible message score is the value of the primary objective link divided by the total value of all links in the e-mail. Link scoring is a way to measure response relative to a campaign's primary objective or call to action.