The From Line

Last year I predicted that 2007 was going to be "the year of the mailman" for email marketing, meaning that everyone including the mailman would engage in the practice.  This is evident in that Constant Contact now claims 150,000 small business customers.  The word is out that email marketing returns big bucks and the little guys want in.  True, email marketing does level the playing field between large and small online retailers since it's an affordable medium and relatively easy to press the send button.  However the newbies to the game need to understand that any monkey can click send and just as anything good in life, realizing a positive ROI from your email marketing takes time, effort, a little bit of smarts and an education.  Yes, you got to get yourself an email marketing education.  Don't be dumb and buy into unscrupulous pie in the sky marketing that you'll sell millions of dollars of your ill conceived widget by blasting some cockamamie email to a three million person list you bought for $300 from Raj in India.  And don't start crying that you didn't sell anything in the first month of sending your weekly email of skateboarding products because you were too stupid to figure out your customers are parents who purchased from you when their little Johnny was going through his skateboarding phase. 

As 2008 rolls in I welcome all newbies to the email marketing community and encourage them to seek the knowledge that will make them successful.  Before you start "blasting" a hole in your list, please read some books, do some research and talk to other people who have been engaged in the email marketing practice for a while. 
 

This time last year I predicted that basic batch and blasters would start to look at RSS as an alternative to email because of cost and deliverability.  Boy was I dead wrong.  Now that I look back at my words, what the hell was I smoking?   Most batch and blasters aren't sophisticated enough to even figure out what RSS stands for let alone how to implement it.  In my opinion RSS didn't make the slightest ding into email's market share and penetration in 2007.  All the RSS proponents that declared the death of email in 2007, where are they now?  They're either jobless or banished to work in the coat closet since they cut their email marketing budgets in 2007 when email returned 48X for every dollar invested.  Ha! Ha!

Don't get me wrong, RSS is a power tool for content syndication... but it's not replacing email.  Not for the rest of 2007 and not in 2008.

What's my prediction for 2008?  I have another few more weeks to figure it out.

The one size fits all mentality simply doesn't work anymore especially when it comes to selling online.  Just when you think you're aiming your marketing and creative efforts at the right target market, think again and think smaller.  Segmentation is the key to generating higher conversion rates from your website and email marketing efforts.  From displaying the right product using geo physical data to creating the perfect offer based on previous email click patterns, segmentation will help to ensure the right offer gets in front of the right person at the right time.  Mass customization is here to stay and you better have the right tools to make it happen with your website and email campaigns. 

Almost all websites are categorized based on product or service type however segmentation is the magic step that results from understanding consumer behavior.  By digging deep into your web analytics, you should be able to tell who buys what from where and how.  For example, if you're a sports apparel retailer just imagine how much more your chances of sale increase if you're able to display a Clinton Portis jersey to a Washington Redskins fan on the front page of your website.  You might be thinking how would this fictitious sports apparel retailer know if a website visitor is a Washington Redskins fan?  Well, since online retailers know their website visitor's IP address they can use geo targeting to display the jersey of an NFL team with the closest proximity.

The same principle applies to email as well.  Every online retailer sends a weekly email campaign hocking their latest wares.  But just because someone bought from an email campaign displaying digital cameras doesn't necessarily mean they are interested in upgrading the camera's memory card as a result of receiving subsequent email campaigns.  When you integrate your email campaigns with your web analytics you get a clearer picture of customers click paths so you send customized follow up messages based on products they actually viewed or maybe have placed in their shopping cart rather than what you think they might purchase.

I was manning the EEC booth at the OMMA conference in New York last week when I met an academic looking fellow named David Blumenstein.  After I pitched him about the EEC and all the cool things the group was working on he grabbed a seat next to me and started to rant about how gray listing is the secret to fighting spam.  Naturally the subject piqued my interest so I prodded him to go into detail.  He said that spammers don't like to receive bounces because it overwhelms their servers.  As a result spammers turn off bounce mechanisms.  Therefore pinging a legitimate mail server will yield a mailer demon and pinging a spammer's server will yield nothing.  He concluded that putting all unknown senders in email purgatory until a mailer demon is received helps to eliminate most spam.  The biggest drawback is that his email is delayed for 12 minutes or so. 

Pretty interesting!  Thanks Dave!  I'll have to try it out.

I'm officially declaring that the Forward to a Friend feature email service providers include in their application as the most stupid thing ever created.  Yes, we at Gold Lasso are just as stupid for including it in eLoop.  The simple fact is that since 100% of the most common used email clients have a forward email feature people use that instead.  The Forward to a Friend gimmick is a failed attempt by email service providers to incorporate "viral" marketing tools into their applications.  We tried to reinvent the wheel and we failed.  The only thing we email service providers can do to save face is to hope that our Forward to a Friend feature reminds people to use their forward button.