Session: What It Takes to Make the Numbers (New Email Ideas to Kickstart Your Program)

Is it true, as Aaron Bailey's earlier report might suggest, that email marketers don't necessarily require recipients' permission any more? I'm not so sure. It may be that permission isn't the most important aspect of email marketing any more. Or it may be that we have bigger fish to fry. So it was very useful to hear from several leading email marketing practitioners to learn about their best practices. Perhaps it's not that permission no longer matters - but that aspects beyond permission may matter more.

Moderator Susan Goodman set the stage well for the conversation, painting a somewhat bleak picture of the competitive landscape while indicating that a turnaround was coming. "The industry didn't die," she said. "But everyone got a little depressed, and we spent too much time firing people and cutting budgets." After talking a little bit about what direct marketers need to learn about the balance between short- and long-term impacts, she introduced the panelists, each of whom added to the bigger picture.

Working in financial services, Scudder Investments has an easier email marketing go than many organizations. Scudder's retirement sector works with a manageable client base - 14,000 - gives special care to about 1,000 of those, and has a solid, stable relationship foundation on which to build. This means that instead of dealing with many of the opt-in/opt-out and spam concerns many email marketers need to navigate, Scudder can focus on personal service, market research, and new product development based on their communications with customers. (Meta-Lesson One: Know Your Customers Well.)

Sprint is in a slightly similar situation, but skews somewhat toward the new customer acquisition angle. David Dickey highlighted the importance of loyalty communications and frequency. Sometimes you don't need to ask a customer to do something. You just want to reach out to them and maintain contact. That dialog and continual connection can contribute a lot to an organization. That said, with so many channels, Sprint faces a consistency challenge. If you've got three different email addresses for one customer based on different aspects of the business, and they unsubscribe, do they just leave that one service - risking anger if you contact them another way - or do they leave all the company's offerings entirely? (Meta-Lesson Two: Reach Out to Your Customers Frequently - and Consistently.)

The witty Andy Sernovitz

Andy Sernovitz, the witty CEO of Gaspedal, had some ways to work around that. With his characteristic energy, and somewhat awkwardly packaged into an acronym-based list of lessons - the title of this entry is inspired by his COWBOY proposal - Sernovitz offered the idea of a "poor man's segmentation." If you're unable to truly personalize email communications, offer options. Citing Amazon as an example, Sernovitz encouraged people to offer multiple newsletter and list options - not just one list. But the most interesting idea I got from Sernovitz's portion of the panel was the need to measure statistics on the back end - as well as upfront. How many people leave your lists? When? Why? If you can solve some of the problems that lead to list leaving, your upfront success will become more sustainable and successful. (Meta-Lesson Three: Cover All of Your Bases - and Watch Your Back.)

A full transcript of this session is also available.