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Read more commentary from Ken Magill

Though all the talk in e-mail marketing circles is about creating relationships with customers and delivering relevant messages, most bulk e-mailers treat their lists like crack addicts, according to a new report from Forrester Research’s Julie Katz.

They keep going back for more no matter how self-destructive their behavior can be.

“Marketers are addicted to bad e-mail habits like over-communicating to subscribers to boost short term returns,” said Katz in the report titles “Break Free From Bad Email.”

Ironically, what causes marketers to abuse e-mail are its main strengths: It’s cheap and immediate.

“Like morphine to a recovering surgery patient, outbound e-mail campaigns deliver fast relief to marketers looking for short term boosts in end-customer activity,” Katz wrote.

However, too much e-mail exacts a cost. As an example, Katz reminds readers of the defunct CDNow. The music merchant first sent e-mails to its customers once a month, then twice a month, then once a week, then every three days. Customers began ignoring the e-mails, contributing to the dot-com’s demise.

As a remedy, Katz recommends what she calls Intentional E-mail, or implementing some basic best practices, integrating data from external sources, segmenting based on past behavior and figuring out the value of an e-mail subscriber.

Of course, nothing Katz says in the report is particularly surprising or controversial. The message she is working to pound home is sound, solid advice.

But there is the message Katz delivers. And then there are the realities of managing a company’s ever expanding e-mail efforts with too few bodies. Who’s got the time or budget for this stuff?

“There’s this mental block that marketers think it’s just too hard,” said Katz in an interview with this newsletter. “And it’s not. I’m trying to simplify the issue.”

First, marketers must stop putting so much value on opens and clicks. “Opens and clicks are fine, but they don’t really say much,” said Katz. “They don’t really mean anything to an upper-level executive.

Among Katz’ recommendations is to adopt the customer-lifetime-value metric that is such a staple of offline direct marketing.

Katz—whose background is in database marketing—said she’s got another report forthcoming aimed at helping marketers figure out the lifetime value of their e-mail addresses.

“The only thing that’s going to be meaningful to these upper-level executives and get e-mail the respect marketers are looking for and push those programs forward is to understand the value that the program brings and think about it over the long term,” she said. “Don’t just think about tomorrow’s revenue.”

Katz in also contends that coordinating e-mail with data from other channels is worth the headache. For example, shopping cart abandonment programs merging e-mail Web analytics and e-commerce data can result in conversion-rate increases of more than 100%, according to Katz.

She added that though short-term thinking may be serving some marketers seemingly just fine right now, consumer behavior is changing in ways such that marketers who don’t start thinking long term are going to pay.

For example, by all accounts, it is getting harder and harder to grow e-mails files. As a result, growth no longer makes up for attrition cause by bad e-mail practices.

“You need to able to hang onto the subscribers you already have and the only way you’re going to do that is by paying attention to their needs,” she said.