Surviving the E-Mail Marketing Jungle

Building the relationship means more than asking for permission for the first date

by Jeffrey Tarter, Softletter

It was bound to happen: Commercial e-mail has turned into a badly overcrowded jungle. Marketers who once routinely achieved response rates of 10%-15% on their e-mail campaigns now feel lucky to pull 3%-5% from increasingly jaded prospects. And the competition for e-mail eyeballs is getting much tougher: Forrester Research predicts that the volume of commercial e-mail will triple in the next five years.

Jeffrey Tarter

So what does it take to survive in the e-mail jungle these days?

The popular (and politically correct) theory is that the winners will be those who ask "permission" to send commercial e-mail to an individual's mailbox. In support of this theory, permission marketing guru Seth Godin points out--correctly--that so-called "opt-in" lists consistently yield higher response rates than spam-like lists of raw, unqualified names.

But I suspect the permission lobby misses an important point: It isn't the act of asking for permission that produces great results, but rather the relationship behind the grant of permission. In fact, most people don't even remember which opt-in lists they've joined: When they see an offer that looks like spam, they trash it (and sometimes even report the sender to the anti-spam cops). Relevant offers and trusted senders almost invariably pass the spam sniff test, even if the issue of permission has never come up.

As a practical matter, of course, relationships have to start somewhere. In fact, e-mail campaigns that target total strangers tend to be expensive and relatively ineffective; e-mail is typically not a great tool for new customer acquisition. (It's no accident that the most aggressive spammers always seem to be peddling pornography and get-rich-quick schemes, where there's not much expectation of a deep relationship.)

At the same time, it's possible to create relationship campaigns that reach well beyond a narrowly-defined group of installed-base customers. The seeds of a relationship are planted whenever someone visits a company's Web site, orders a demo copy, hears a trade show speaker, or even recognizes a product's brand name. A company's circle of "friends and family" is often surprisingly large, and most of the people in this extended circle don't object to e-mail that strengthens their ties to the company.

If you look at how good e-mail marketers develop relationship-based campaigns, you’ll see a few common principles that are far more important than “opt-in” theories:

·    Don't get pushy: Relationships take time to grow, even on Internet time. From the customer's perspective, a one-time transaction--a trialware download, say, or a single purchase--doesn't automatically create trust or confer the right to collect extensive profile information. Instead, it's important to build the relationship gradually, with e-mail newsletters, tips, surveys, discounts, seminar invitations, and other low-pressure offers that leave the customer with a sense of control over the relationship.

·    Showcase a strong relationship benefit: Ideally, customers should want to stay on your e-mail list--for instance, to get free updates for products that are evolving rapidly, or to qualify for "membership" discounts. For software companies, an especially effective way to build a loyal e-mail list is by offering a regular tips-and-techniques newsletter. Anything that enhances a customer's successful use of a product (or service) is likely to be perceived as an especially compelling relationship benefit.

·    Personalize the message: Demonstrating personal knowledge about the customer--such as embedding the recipient's name in an e-mail--can be a powerful reminder of a past relationship. Although personalization technology and data mining can get very elaborate, often the same impact can be achieved by sending standard e-mail messages to easily-identified customer segments. One example: When book buyers look like they might be drifting away, Amazon.com sends an e-mail that says, "We notice that you haven't shopped with us in a while..." and invites the recipient to visit the store again.

·    Write like a human being: Tone and style matter a great deal in the e-mail world. Even when a relationship is well established, customers are less likely to feel a sense of intimacy when e-mail sounds like the voice of an anonymous corporation, bureaucratic and formal. We're more likely to feel engaged if we get a friendly-sounding note from Sally Jones in customer service or an "important message" from the CEO. Too much energy and enthusiasm can also be a turn-off: Hard-sell marketing pitches are as unwelcome as an insurance salesman who hands out business cards at a wedding.

·    Respond to feedback: Personalization creates an illusion of one-to-one communication, so it's not surprising that an e-mail campaign will sometimes generate literally hundreds of tech support questions, feature requests, testimonials, address changes, and other random comments. No one in a company is ever eager to write personal answers to all these messages, but ignoring them can create a lot of bad feeling among people with an above-average interest in the company.

·    Stay in touch: Relationships depend on reasonably frequent communication--typically, at least a half-dozen messages a year (preferably several brief, single-subject e-mails instead of a few less-frequent omnibus messages). But if there's nothing interesting to write about, don't crank out filler material just to meet a schedule. In the online world, no one has permission to be a bore.

Editor and publisher Jeffrey Tarter, who founded Softletter in 1983, is a well-known industry analyst who has been described as "quietly powerful" by Marketing Computers. Tarter has been twice named "Best Industry Analyst" by the Software Publishers Association, and is widely quoted in the business and trade press.

Softletter is a twice-monthly industry newsletter that reports on business issues and trends in personal computer software publishing. Written for an audience of senior level industry executives, Softletter tracks new marketing and distribution tactics, company operations, finance, pricing models, product management, and emerging technologies.