Email News and Leads Today

So 2009 has settled in...wearing shoddy shoes and a stained shirt, and unlikely to win any awards for outstanding economic achievement. How will a new year impact your email marketing?

The answer depends on who you read and what the author is trying to sell. (An early victim of the recession was marketing subtlety.)

Reviewing dozens of posts, publications, articles and opinions, I jotted down some key questions to ask of any forward-looking email marketing effort.

Not the questions we ask all the time, but those that address the new challenges and opportunities that await the innocent marketer in a nervous and changing online business environment.

See what you think...

2009 Challenge #1 Coping with even more competition

Everyone agrees that budgets for email marketing will benefit from economic uncertainty. Which means more emails and more competition. So...

1. What do your emails offer that people can't get from any other email list?

"If you are not providing any kind of exclusive offering to your email subscribers, you need to before it's too late."
Simms Jenkins

2. If a competitor started offering the same content or similar offers, why would subscribers stay with your list?

"Which newsletters and promotional emails do you anticipate, open as soon as they arrive and value the most? I'll bet that most of them have distinctive personalities."
Loren McDonald

3. The value of an active email subscriber grows in direct proportion to the clamor for their attention. Do you recognize that and give long-term subscriber retention at least as much focus as short-term results?

"Sending too frequently just to win a king of the inbox battle with your competitors is not a net positive for you or your brand."
Nate Romance

4. Is the value you offer and image you project the same as last year? (If so, they are diminishing in relative terms.)

"Maybe it is time to refresh your email layouts and designs."
Dylan Boyd

5. If emails need to deliver value, is that same objective shared by everyone in your organization who sends emails to customers or prospects?

6. And are all those emails projecting the kind of image or brand associations you'd like them to?

7. The more choices and voices out there, the more people gravitate to those they trust. As you look to boost returns, does that come at a cost in this trust?

"...we cannot trade short-term revenue for long-term customer mistrust."
Kevin Hillstrom

8. We've all heard the targeting mantra. But what concrete steps are you taking to target better?

"The single most important way you can improve your email performance is to increase relevance through greater use of segmentation and dynamic content"
Loren McDonald

2009 Challenge #2 Facing fatigue

More emails and more communication channels means more recipients edging ever closer to information overload and message fatigue. Which is why this year will see greater focus on the role of email frequency.

Given the risks of email overload...

9. Are you controlling the number of emails your subscribers get (not just from you, but from everyone in the organization)?

10. Do you think declining responses are best reversed by sending more emails or by building a better email program?

"One fashion retailer recently increased its promotional emails from five to 15 per month and learned to its detriment that unsubscribe and undeliverable rates increased so much that their gross profits actually dropped."
Simone Barratt and Arthur Middleton Hughes

11. Have you investigated ways of letting users guide frequency?

"We need to look at how often we are mailing our subscribers and give them the ability to control frequency and what types of messages they receive. And just as importantly, we need to change our focus from being primarily promotional to lifecycle-focused..."
Aaron Smith

12. Or ways matching frequency to engagement or some other recipient characteristic?

"There is not a top-down X emails per month number that you can manage to. Instead, you need to understand your audience in terms of how much you have communicated to them and, more importantly, how engaged they are with you, and use that to guide communication frequency"
Steven Woods

2009 Challenge #3 Sign-up skepticism

With message overload growing, people won't be throwing themselves at email lists and are more likely to suffer from subscriber remorse...

13. What innovative techniques are you using to draw attention to the benefits of your email list?

14. Have you subscribed to your own emails to see what kind of experience the new recipient goes through during and after the sign-up process? Where is there room for improvement?

15. What tools are you giving recipients to spread the word about the value of your emails?

2009 Challenge #4 New tactics and technologies

Each new year brings its fair share of novel ideas, innovations and technical improvements. But...

16. Are you implementing new tactics because some Englishman in Austria with a blog said they worked or because they make intrinsic sense for your list, audience and email model, or because you tested the ideas and found them beneficial?

"A particular danger is that excited marketers start using videos in email because they can, and not because they should."
Me

17. Are your emails taking advantage of authentication?

"I was shown a message about Sender ID and phishing that appeared to indicate that the Office Depot email was flagged because it failed Sender ID and phishing tests"
Chad White

18. Do you have a strategy in place for mobile email? (Even if your strategy is to have no strategy.)

"Mobile's biggest challenge will be in forcing you to cross the final frontier in your email-marketing program to make it completely customer-centric"
Stefan Pollard

19. If you modify your design for those who might use a mobile device, how does that change the impact of your emails on the (majority) not viewing using a mobile device?

2009 Challenge #5 Making more of metrics

Email marketing is still focused on metrics that grew out of the needs and technologies of a different millennium. Moves are afoot to change that, led by such folk as the EEC's Measurement Accuracy Roundtable and bloggers like Kevin Hillstrom.

20. Have you considered the email impacts that don't show up in standard campaign reports?

"The impacts of email marketing are more measurable than for most other forms of marketing. But let's not delude ourselves that we're measuring everything."
Me

21. When you get an unusually bad or good result, do you shrug and move on or do you search for the lesson and apply them to future emails.

22. A lot of practical advice talks about the benefits of following one "best practice" or another. It's heresy, but do you give equal consideration to the costs of achieving those benefits?

"...the clothing retailer could have saved untold creative resources by injecting more standardization into its welcome emails and landing pages."
Chris Marriott

2009 Challenge #6 Web 2.0 and multichannel thinking

23. Do you think of email as a standalone channel whose budget needs protecting from "competing" channels and technologies, or do you look for synergies with those channels and technologies?

"The fact is that twice as many people log on to Facebook every month as watch American Idol."
Jason Baer

24. How does your Web 2.0 strategy change when email itself becomes part of the social media world?

"We are calling this next generation of Yahoo! Mail the smarter inbox."
Yahoo! Mail blog

25. You want people to repost your email content to Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc., so are you producing the kind of content that people will want to share with others?

"The best way to get people to spread your message is to create messages worth spreading."
Me

26. Are you exploring Web 2.0 tactics because of all the media attention it gets or because it's the right fit for your audience and business?

[This post brought to you by Campaigner Email Marketing]

Have a happy-email day! Vance Alford