Email is different

OMI responded to my post about data cleansing yesterday. She asked an interesting question:

Why do so many in this industry feel that the email channel should be somehow held to a higher standard than other direct marketing channels?

There are a lot of reasons why the email channel is held to a higher standard. The big one is actually that the consumers have a big enough stick (in the form of ISPs and filters) to wield against senders that annoy them. This actually boils down to who owns the channel.

In many cases of advertising, marketers own the channel. Direct postal mail, banner ads, radio and TV ads, those channels are all developed the use of marketers. Marketers can use the channel as long as they pay the owner: the TV station, the billboard company, the radio station, the website.

In all those marketing channels there is some monetary cost to increasing frequency and some non-marketer-controlled limit on how frequent you can touch the target. There are only so many minutes available for marketing in a TV or radio hour and they cost real dollars. There’s only so much page space available for press. Billboards cost real money and you can’t just put a billboard up anywhere.

But email is very different. First off, the channel wasn’t built with the idea that it would be funded by marketing. Secondly, the recipient (or their proxies in the form of the ISPs) own the email channel. This changes not only the economics, but also the constraints.

Because it costs so little for marketers to send more mail, there are no real constraints on the amount they can send. On the recipient end, though, there are major constraints on the amount of attention they can give to mail. The more marketing mail they get from any source, the less ability they have to focus on any one offer.

Email is different because it is not solely a marketing channel.

Email is different because the recipient has more control.

Email is different because marketers don’t pay the full cost of transmission.

Email is different because recipients pay for part of the marketing.

Marketers are held to a higher standard because email marketing is subsidized by recipients and recipient ISPs.

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Motivating people

I’ve been thinking a lot about motivating people recently. What really motivates people to do things? Why do we make the choices we make? How do you convince people to do things when they’re unsure they want to do those things?
Let me give you an example. Friends of mine are fostering dogs for local rescues. A neighbor of theirs is trying to start a rescue herself. The neighbor is trying to motivate people by posting pictures of dead dogs in garbage bags. On one level, I get the neighbor’s point: that image is what motivates her to take action. But all that’s doing for other people, my friends included, is driving them away from working with her.
What she needs is a better grasp of how to motivate people. She needs to learn how to speak to people in a way that will motivate them to help her. Unfortunately, she thinks that what motivates her will motivate everyone, except it doesn’t. In fact, it’s doing the exact opposite for some people who are actually sympathetic to her cause.
What does this have to do with email?
I’m often surprised at how many marketing professionals can’t or won’t tailor their argument to their audience. Look at filters, many marketers have told me over the years about how mean ISPs are to them, how the ISPs make poor filtering decisions and how what should really happen is marketers should tell the ISPs to fix their filters.
In very few cases, though, have I seen a marketer actually try and talk to an ISP rep on their terms. It seems so simple to me: marketers are people who motivate people for a living so they should be able to market their own wants to ISPs. They just need to find the right message, but they don’t seem to be able to think about things from the ISP perspective.
I’m not sure I actually have an answer. But how do we motivate people to do things has been a major topic in my head recently. I think the best motivation is often to convince the other party that a given course is in their best interest. The tricky bit is selling that message.
How have you sold a message the other party didn’t want to hear?

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Unsolicited feedback

Those of us in the email space often have opinions about volume and frequency and opt-in and everything involved in email marketing. What we don’t always have is the luxury of receiving unsolicited feedback from recipients.
Every once in a while I find a post online that is that unsolicited feedback from someone. Today a poster on reddit describes his experience with signing petitions and the resulting mail from political causes. After signing a number of petitions, he started getting huge amounts of email. The volume was so high, he started unsubscribing.
I’m not going to copy his whole article here, but there are some interesting points relevant to the email marketing end of things.

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Best Practices: your mileage may vary

YMMV. One of those abbreviations us old folks used ages ago before email had pictures and the closest we had to social networking was USENET and social gaming was in the form of MUDs. I rarely see it used any more. In a lot of ways that’s a sad thing. It was a very useful abbreviation. Using it at the end of a post full of advice was a sign that the author was providing information but knew that different situations may require different solutions. It acknowledged that what might be the best practice in one form may not be the best for another.
It’s not just the usage that seems to have declined, there seem to be a lot more people who just want to share The Answer! and not acknowledge their experience may not be universal. This seems particularly rampant in email marketing, at least to me (YMMV).
I’ve talked before about how I don’t believe there are any universal best practices for email.
Let’s be honest, the experience of a well known national retailer buying, or appending email addresses is not going to be the same as a local business doing the same thing. The national retailer acquiring email addresses and sending well targeted mail to their purchasers probably won’t cause too many delivery problems, and will generate revenue. The local pizza place probably won’t be so lucky.
A number of marketers have complained that they all too often hear “it depends” when they ask a question about email. But how well a particular email campaign perform does depend. Success depends on the audience and the offer. But more than just the specific offer, success also depends on how well known the brand is and what their real world reputation with customers is.
Customers are a lot more likely to give brands the benefit of the doubt if they like the product. That means poor practices don’t always result in poor results. It also means other companies may not have the same success with poor practices.
Your Mileage May Vary.

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