Email as social media

Rachel Luxemburg, a good friend of mine who runs the Community team over at Adobe, tweeted a link to Successful Social Media is More Than A Campaign. I was reading that article and realized quite how much of it applies to email. In fact, a couple of Amber’s specific recommendations are directly relevant to email.

Businesses that are supporting their outward facing social media efforts with a true underlying philosophy are the ones that will win in the long run. That means your campaigns need to be representative of broader goals to:

  • Listen to the newly amplified and disseminated voices of your customers online, and the feedback they’re sharing
  • Respond to that feedback, and take it into consideration when you make decisions related to how you operate
  • Provide helpful, useful information to your customers that supports their entire relationship with you, not just their moment of purchase

Sounds exactly like the rules of engagement to me. Unlike social media, there aren’t as many direct routes to feedback. You’re not going to get a response on a Facebook page, or an angry tweet in response to an email, but if you’re listening to your recipients you can get feedback. That feedback is not just the standard open rate or unsubscribes or clicks or ROI. You can leverage social networks and look for people talking about the campaign or sharing links with members of their networks.
Email is more than just a way to batch and blast, it is social. Are you holding up your end of the relationship?

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It's not illegal to block mail

My post “We’re going to party like it’s 1996” is still getting a lot of comments from people. Based on the comments, either people aren’t reading or my premise wasn’t clear.
Back in 1996 the first lawsuits were brought against ISPs to stop ISPs from blocking email. These suits were failures. Since that time, other senders have attempted to sue ISPs and lost. Laws have been written protecting the rights of the ISPs to block content they deem to be harmful.
Dela says that he was just attempting to open up a conversation, but I don’t see what he thinks the  conversation is. That ISPs shouldn’t block mail their customers want? Sure, OK. We’re agreed on that. Now, define what mail recipients want. I want what mail I want, not what someone else decides I might want.
Marketers need to get over the belief that they own end users mailboxes and that they have some right to send mail to people. You don’t.
When marketers actually start sending wanted mail, to people who actually subscribe – not just make a purchase, or register online or happen to have an easily discoverable email address – then perhaps marketers will have some standing to claim they are being treated illegally. Until and unless that happens, the ISPs are well within their rights to block mail that their users don’t want.

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Email is not direct mail

Had an interesting talk with a colleague at a BBQ this weekend. He was at a large ISP and then moved on to do delivery at a large email marketing company. This marketing company was started by a very successful direct (snail mail) marketer. The CEO believed totally in testing and they measured everything. They knew what colors provoked a better response and which fonts were better received by recipients.
But this wasn’t always enough. They had some spotty delivery and my friend was hired to try and solve the delivery problems. He had some luck and did fix a number of things, but there was a deeper issue he couldn’t address: that email is not direct mail. The types of testing done is the type of testing for direct mail. They were so focused on getting the best response to a particular offer they refused to consider tweaking an offer from their “proven ideal” to stop triggering content filters at some large ISPs. So their ideal offers would sometimes end up in the inbox and sometimes in the bulk folder and sometimes just disappear.
With direct mail, the USPS is required by law to deliver mail to the addressee. Not only that there are a lot of barriers put up to prevent (or discourage) recipients to opt-out of receiving direct mail. This isn’t the case in email. Not only is their no requirement for an ISP to deliver email to recipients, there is actually a law that says that recipients must be able to opt-out from receiving future emails.
Direct marketers are used to having a lot of freedom and control over their mail. They can buy and sell address lists and send almost anything they want without having anyone tell them they can’t. That mindset translates badly into the email space where the ISPs and the recipients have a lot of control over their incoming email. It means that senders with the absolute perfect test copy see delivery problems because their perfect copy looks just like something a spammer would do and gets caught in content filters. It means they come into email and try to buy a list and discover that while it may be financially viable, they have to deal with angry upstreams, blocks at recipient ISPs and sometimes a Spamhaus listing.
Email isn’t the same as direct mail and attempting to map direct mail techniques onto email usually doesn’t work.

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Check your assumptions

One of the things that prompted yesterday’s post was watching a group of marketers discuss how to get subscribers to give them their “real” or “high value” email addresses. Addresses at free email providers are seen as less valuable than addresses at a place of employment or at a cable company or dialup ISP. The discussion centered around how to incentivize recipients to give up their “actual” email addresses.
The underlying belief is that users don’t use free mail accounts for their important mail, and if a recipient gives a marketer a free mail account as a signup that they will not be reading the mail regularly. Better to get an email address that the recipient checks frequently so there is a better chance at a conversion and sale.
Perfectly acceptable marketing goals, but makes a number of assumptions that I am not sure are valid.
Assumption 1: An email address at a freemail provider is less important to the recipient than a different email address.
Wrong! A sender has no idea if a recipient uses a freemail account exclusively or has another real email address. Many people these days use gmail as their primary account and they don’t check the email account associated with their dialup or broadband provider. For instance I have an email account at AT&T associated with our UVerse TV and internet service, but have never logged in to do anything with email.
Assumption 2: A non freemail address gives better response rates.
Really? I haven’t seen data one way or another saying that different classes of email addresses give better responses. It may be true, but it may not.  Some users do have separate accounts for friends and family and marketing mail. In that case, are senders better off in the marketing account? Or in the F&F account where the user may hit the “this is spam” button just because that mail is in the wrong place?
Assumption 3: I’ve been invited in, I get free run of the place
Wrong! Just because you’ve been invited onto the front porch for a glass of lemonade, doesn’t mean you’re welcome in the bedroom. Marketing is all about pushing limits and getting more and more from recipients, but in email marketing the recipients get to hit the “this is spam” filter and stop delivery of that email. Limit pushing in email may result in all out blocks and zero inbox delivery, rather than causing a massive increase in sales.
Assumption 4: Incentivized permission is the same as real permission
Wrong! Just because a subscriber hits the “give me a coupon” or “enter me in the drawing” link does not mean they want mail from that sender. What it really means is the recipient wants a chance to win something or get $5 off their next purchase. Just because they closed the loop to get an incentive does not mean the sender gets a free pass through spam filters or is exempt from having their mail marked as spam.
The marketing relationship between sender and recipient is a lot more balanced than any other direct marketing relationship. The sender can’t ignore the recipients’ preferences over the long term without suffering delivery problems. Many email marketers, particularly those that didn’t start in email, forget that the relationship is different and marketers have to respect the recipient.

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