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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Less can be more and more can be more

The Wall Street Journal reports that some large retailers are scaling back their email marketing. Benefits of sending less mail include higher open rates, lower unsubscribe rates and an increase in sales.

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Dear Email Address Occupant

There’s a great post over on CircleID from John Levine and his experience with a marketer sending mail to a spam trap.
Apparently, some time back in 2002 someone opted in an address that didn’t belong to them to a marketing database. It may have been a hard to read scribble that was misread when the data was scanned (or typed) into the database. It could be that the person didn’t actually know their email address. There are a lot of ways spamtraps can end up on lists that don’t involve malice on the part of the sender.
But I can’t help thinking that mailing an address for 10 years, where the person has never ever responded might be a sign that the address isn’t valid. Or that the recipient might not want what you’re selling or, is not actually a potential customer.
I wrote a few weeks back about the difference between delivery and marketing. That has sparked conversations, including one where I discovered there are a lot of marketers out there that loathe and despise delivery people. But it’s delivery people who understand that not every email address is a potential purchaser. Our job is to make sure that mail to non-existent “customers” doesn’t stop mail from actually getting to actual potential customers.
Email doesn’t have an equivalent of “occupant” or “resident.” Email marketers need to pay attention to their data quality and hygiene. In the snail mail world, that isn’t true. My parents still get marketing mail addressed to me, and I’ve not lived in that house for 20+ years. Sure, it’s possible an 18 year old interested in virginia slims might move into that house at some point, and maybe that 20 years of marketing will pay off. It only costs a few cents to keep that address on their list and the potential return is there.
In email, though, sending mail to addresses that don’t have a real recipient there has the potential to hurt delivery to all other recipients on your list. Is one or two bad addresses going to be the difference between blocked and inbox? No, but the more abandoned addresses and non-existent recipients on a list there are on a list, the more likely filters will decide the mail isn’t really important or wanted.
The cost of keeping that address, one that will never, ever convert on a list may mean losing access to the inbox of actual, real, converting customers.
 

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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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