Email Marketing Strategy from Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey
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July 26, 2006
Anti-spammer Turns Spammer
On a lighter note, a colleague forwarded me this blog entry by the news editor for NetworkWorld. It's a humorous account of a public relations firm that spammed journalists on behalf of its client -- an anti-spam solutions provider. My favorite part of the article is the punch line: the message begins: "Hello [RecipientFirstName]:"
July 14, 2006
A Great Overview on Mobile Marketing
I really liked MarketingSherpa's recent article, "Mobile Marketing: Quick Overview of Options" (open access until July 23). This new channel is both exciting and a little frightening to marketers, and it generates a lot of questions.
For most marketers, mobile marketing represents a mix of things: advertising networks, branded downloads such as ring tones, directed communications such as SMS alerts, and interactive branding such as polls and contests.
MarketingSherpa's article focuses on the area most aligned with email marketing: SMS and text messaging. Some great takeaways include:
July 12, 2006
Email Marketers and the Frequency Trap
I just read a great article by David Baker, vice president of email marketing at Agency.com. In his July 10 column for MediaPost's Email Insider, David asks the age-old question: how much email is too much? On one hand, marketers say they want to better understand the email channel and its ability to foster online customer relationships. On the other, they continue to shower recipients with urgent promotional messages that become less and less meaningful over time.
But if marketers know that implementing best practices, strategy and testing are the way to inspire loyalty and ROI, and they have the capability to do those things, why do they do they keep falling back on marketer-driven messaging? The answer seems to lie in basic human nature: it's simply more gratifying in the short-term.
David shares the story of a "more is better" client that has started mailing the same message, only with differing subject lines, to recipients as many as three times a week. The company, which has set ambitious email sales goals with no additional budget to achieve them, is getting good results and sees no reason to stop. David questions whether this short-term success is sustainable. But like so many things in life, it seems that these marketers will have to find out for themselves.
As I mention in my book, "The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing," the problem with over-mailing is that it can actually work for short periods of time, all the while silently ravaging your brand and any future return. Never forget that recipients will give you the benefit of the doubt right up until the moment they decide to ignore you completely.
July 11, 2006
Being an Independent Company in the Email Marketing Space
I was tremendously flattered to be selected for BtoB Magazine's Who's Who list in 2006. A reporter for the magazine, Carol Krol, interviewed me in advance, and asked why Silverpop hadn't followed the path of so many other ESPs and sell out to a larger company.
While we have received many solicitations to join the merger and acquisition activity in our space, I truly believe that we can offer the very best solution to our clients as an independent company.
As a small, independent company, we do only one thing--email marketing. We have nothing else to fall back on, and we are passionate about being the best at what we do. The fact is, nearly every leader in cutting-edge markets started out as a small upstart surrounded by huge incumbents. Whether it was Intel, Cisco or Microsoft, these companies ultimately became giants themselves because they focused on one set of important products and had no choice but to be world-class with them. While most main-frame companies were trying to make their own small computers, IBM made the radical decision to partner with Intel and Microsoft to offer a joint solution based around best-in-class components. That decision created the entire PC industry as we know it, and nearly everyone who reads this blog has that decision to thank for their jobs today.
Most of the M&A activity in our space has been from direct and database marketing firms. For those of you who have been in this industry a while, you will recall that most of these companies had acquired or invested in email marketing companies four to five years ago. Those acquisitions did not work out, and the email units subsequently were shut down. It's possible that things are different this time around, but it's not a bet I think our clients want us to make. The fact is that we share clients with many database marketing firms (a few of which have acquired our competitors), and integration is very achievable, regardless of whether they own us or we remain independent. In fact, our recent partnership with Abacus is a testament to the quality of integration that can be achieved between partners. Our shared clients benefit from the combination of two fully integrated best-in-class companies, yet they retain the ability the mix and match different vendors in the future.
When it comes to email, Web analytics, consumer data and database management, one size does not fit all.
July 03, 2006
Making Complaints Work Better for Everyone
I read a great MediaPost article (requires free sign-in) by David Atlas, an executive from Goodmail systems. David outlines the ideal spam/complaint feedback system, and I think he has hit the nail on the head.
David contends that the current email complaint system lacks accuracy, granularity and security. For instance, one person clicking the spam button 10 times generates the same number of complaints as 10 people who each click once; recipients can't register the nature of their complaints, which accrue to IP addresses rather than senders; and the system doesn't protect against falsely-generated complaints.
He says the ideal system would be sender-based rather than IP-based. People would only be allowed to complain once per message, and frequency would be accounted for. The system also would also differentiate between complaints for commercial vs. transactional messages, by domain, and allow recipients to specify why they are complaining and what they would like to do about it. Both recipients and senders also would be protected against abuses of the system.
A reputation system based on this kind of complaint mechanism would benefit everyone. Senders would get better feedback and a more equitable allocation of emailing privileges, and consumers would get more relevant messages.
Sort of like Babe Ruth's fabled finger pointing out his home run before he hit it, perhaps David's article will point ISPs and ESPs in a direction of more accurate and more accountable complaint management.
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