Time to Learn an Old Language

This is a most dangerous time for e-mail marketing managers.

The channel’s greatest strengths cause some seriously flawed marketing, and boy do those flaws come out when people start to panic.

E-mail’s so cheap to send, the marketer can downright suck at the craft and still make money. And e-mail is so immediate, it results in short-term thinking, especially in times where CMOs aren’t meeting their already scaled-back forecasts.

Some approximation of the following conversation is happening in marketing departments everywhere:

E-mail manager: We can’t keep hammering our file like this. People are going to start complaining and we’re going to get blocked.

E-mail manager’s senior: Yeah? Well, do you want to explain to the CEO why we shouldn’t be making the money this campaign will generate? Do you understand how dire things are?

And yes, the e-mail manager probably does understand how dire things are. Who doesn’t? Trouble is, he can’t make his case against stupid marketing practices in a language management can understand. They don’t care about clicks and opens.

So most e-mail managers’ current marching orders are: “Shut up and send.”

In a case of seemingly perfect timing, a new book is due out March 3 that will help tip the scales in e-mail managers’ favor

In Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies, from Hunting to Farming, Arthur Middleton Hughes, senior strategist at e-Dialog and Arthur Sweetser, chief marketing officer of the e-mail service provider, take readers through a step-by-step approach to implementing database-marketing essentials to improve e-mail’s marketing returns intelligently.

Hughes is traditional database marketing’s Great Explainer. Among his achievements was founding the Database Marketing Institute in 1994, which in six years gave two-day seminars to 1,400 database marketing executives. He has a way of explaining concepts such as cost per order and average lifetime value—staples of database marketing—so everyone can understand, calculate and put them to use.

He also understands everybody’s got a lot to do, resources are tight and radically retooling direct marketing programs is not often possible. His writings reflect that understanding by offering suggestions on simple steps marketers can take immediately to get headed down the right path.

Sweetser is no slouch either. Like Hughes, he has more than 20 years experience in direct marketing, many of them at S&H Greenpoints. He also did stints at Gearon Hoffman Advertising in Boston and Ogilvy and Mather where he worked on national accounts, such as American Express, Nynex, AMD Sony Professional Products and Bank of Boston.

Hughes and Sweetser have the perfect backgrounds to deliver much-needed database-marketing advice to e-mail managers while taking into account the channel’s differences from traditional direct marketing.

The book’s from-hunting-to-farming thesis contends that those who cultivate their customer e-mail lists using database marketing—the minority of marketers these days—can spot and exploit profitable list segments and send messages to them that result in higher opens, clicks and conversion rates than those who blast their entire files.

“Successful E-mail Marketing Strategies, from Hunting to Farming,” is no “The Long Tail,” the name for a niche marketing philosophy advanced by Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson in 2004.

In fact, the folks at Wired probably won’t get within 100 feet of this book.

Good.

E-mail managers don’t need a new marketing philosophy. They need an old marketing philosophy with proven metrics explained in a way that allows them to weave it into their e-mail programs and get more out of their increasingly hard-to-acquire customer e-mail addresses.

“Successful Marketing Strategies” doesn’t just tell readers they should send relevant e-mail. It explains how to achieve relevance and measure it. It explains old-school concepts such as how to market using recency, frequency and monetary value. It explains calculating customer lifetime value and the cost to acquire a new customer, and how to use that information in easy-to-understand terms.

It also covers topics unique to e-mail marketing, such as crafting effective subject lines and harnessing the power of transactional messages.

Besides being extremely timely, “Successful Marketing Strategies” is highly readable and, most importantly, useful. And that’s the best compliment a trade book can receive.