Email marketing

Two words should play on your mind when email marketing: accountability and quality.

Accountability

Both email marketers and email distributors are more accountable for their behaviour than they used to be. Led primarily by consumer dissatisfaction at unsolicited (spam) messages, the email industry has developed systems capable of tracking and penalising email abuse. If you spam a lot, it is likely emails from your domain will languish in consumers’ spam boxes. Worse still you may have a hard time finding a reliable, credible email distributor, many of which are turning their backs on spammers.

Most email distributors now work hard to stop unsolicited emails from flowing through their systems. Once upon a time, higher email volumes equated to higher profit. But now, emails which are later flagged as spam by the recipient carry a cost to the distributor. Too much spam means the email servers they use may be blacklisted by spam filters. This is a costly headache for distributors, and could adversely affect other email marketers using their systems legitimately.

As a consequence, most credible email distributors are getting tough on rogue email marketers. Many insist that customers abide by the principles of “permission-based email marketing” - that every recipient has explicitly agreed to be contacted for marketing purposes. And to ensure that obligation is honoured, behaviour is monitored closely. If your spam count consistently rises above their threshold, you may be politely asked to take your business elsewhere.

In short, email distributors have been forced to be more accountable, and as a consequence have placed more accountability onto the email marketer’s doorstep.

Quality

A cynic might argue that forced accountability explains why email marketers are cleaning up their act. An optimist might argue in retort that, independent of that pressure, marketers have realised that unsolicited and indiscriminately targeted email campaigns are bad business. Not only are they becoming difficult to manage, they are deemed to be short sighted and not befitting of a customer-led marketing strategy. Quality and relevant email messages, targeted towards only those that want to receive them, represent the new ideal for email marketers.

Strong, relevant, clear messages that are well-designed and closely targeted carry with them a more positive response from consumers. Such a campaign tends to deliver better results in terms of open rates, click throughs, lead-generation and sales. And importantly, such campaigns are less irritable to consumers, meaning brands are not damaged and spam buttons are not clicked so readily.

The email marketer might take wisdom from two simple mantras… ‘Content is king’ and ‘Quality over quantity’. Content - the what you say (copy) and how you present it (design) - are important determinants of the quality and thus success of an email campaign. Content is king; and unsurprisingly so, when you think about it. Quality over quantity refers to both the quality and size of email distribution lists, and the frequency of emails an email marketer chooses to send. Accountability concerns and quality targeting should ensure that emails are both compliant and effective in terms of their relevance to the customer. Quality over quantity also questions the frequency of email marketing messages. As experience tells us, too many emails can make consumers apathetic and irritated.

As an aside - it is important to point out that email distributors are doing their bit to encourage higher quality email campaigns. Some industry commentators are hailing a new era of “email marketing 2.0″ inspired by next-generation web technologies. Back-end and front-end systems are improving, not just to control spam, but to attract new customers, who are demanding tools to build high-quality campaigns. Such developments have advanced a myriad of factors, including design, use of dynamic content based on user profiles, easier segmentation of data, tracking, and compatibility with browsers and CRM databases, to name a few.

In short, both email marketers and email distributors are striving to improve the quality of their work. This is good for everyone.

Moving forward

Both email marketer and distributor share the same two goals: both must be more accountable for their behaviour, and both must constantly improve the quality of their work to satisfy their customers and stay competitive. Accountability and quality are not just buzzwords, they are words to remember.

For the email marketer, this means two things. He must devise a strong email marketing strategy in keeping with a maturing industry. And he must find a distributor that plays its role too.

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