eMarketer: What is e-mail marketing's greatest strength?
Bill Nussey: What makes e-mail marketing unique is the
ability to both broadcast and target individual personalized content at
the same time. It's also relatively inexpensive compared with other
media.
eMarketer: What is its greatest weakness?
Mr. Nussey: E-mail's greatest weakness is that some marketers
use it too aggressively, and they undermine the value of e-mail for all
other marketers and consumers.
Obviously, what I'm talking about is spam, selling me drugs or high school or
college diplomas, or other such nonsense, and that makes an otherwise pretty good medium less valuable for everybody.
eMarketer: Do you think that consumers' use of e-mail has changed in ways that
e-mail marketers need to be cognizant of?
Mr. Nussey: Absolutely. Specifically—and there's been studies
on this—consumers are only willing to have a finite number of online
e-mail offers at a given time.
"Consumers are only willing to have a finite number of online e-mail offers at a given time."
For example, my neighbor might only be willing to have 10 or 12
e-mail newsletters, promotions or other subscriptions at any given
time, and he might delete, unsubscribe or spam-button the ones that are
no longer interesting to him.
A lot of marketers think of their e-mail programs in isolation, or
if they do think about competition, they think about other companies
like them. But truly what they're competing for is the very limited
attention that consumers and business recipients have for all e-mail,
for the channel. So marketers need to be sure that they are one of
those dozen or so active subscriptions that their target audience is
actually paying attention to.
eMarketer: Are there other changes in the way that people communicate or use e-mail?
Mr. Nussey: Many, many. One that marketers new to e-mail
marketing don't pick up on is that when most consumers are no longer
interested in a subscription,
rather than unsubscribing, they hit the spam button. So there's yet
another major incentive for marketers to remain relevant, to remain
engaged with their recipient base—rather than just press the blast
button every week.
eMarketer: Even if I opt in, and then later on get bored with
a
particular retailer's e-mail message, instead of unsubscribing, I press
the spam button. If that happens enough, that could hurt the retailer's
ability to send e-mails to other customers who want to receive them, is
that correct?
Mr. Nussey: Yes, and it's very common. In fact that's what most
people do now.
eMarketer: Is there a way that an e-mail service provider can
figure out how not to
punish a retailer because of a certain group of people who are pressing
the spam button when they should really be unsubscribing?
Mr. Nussey: Look at the activity of individual recipients on
your list over the last six or 12 months, and people that are
fundamentally inactive—who haven't clicked, haven't opened, haven't
purchased—take 'em off your list. What you really need to be concerned
about is total respondents and total conversion rates, not how big
your list is.
But if that's not available to you because your boss wants the list
to remain large, put up a profile page and ask people the kind of
things they want to receive. Ask them the frequency they want to
receive their promotions. Typically when people get frustrated and hit
the unsubscribe button it's usually because the marketer is sending too
often or allowing messages to be sent from other brands that people
didn't subscribe to.
Keep the list extremely private and deal with the purposes
people opted in for. That alone will pretty much keep you in the green
zone for good e-mail marketing.
"Keep...in the green zone for good e-mail marketing."
eMarketer: Are most Web retailers sending e-mails that people have opted in to
receive?
Mr. Nussey: My company does a study every year, and we look
at the patterns and trends in e-mail marketing for retailers. Based on
our research, the vast majority—well above 90% of all online retailers
of all sizes—have an e-mail capture on their Website.
