Email Marketing: The Incredibly Shrinking Relevance

Google News.com

Email as an independent marketing channel is growing increasingly irrelevant.

First, the facts. Email is a commodity. Prices are dropping, and it is getting more difficult to distinguish vendors on based on features alone. 'Batch and blast' email as a standalone lead generation tool is a failure. Marketers, increasingly measured on business results like revenue, profits, and pipeline, are struggling to grasp the value that email packages provide. The traditional measurements of success--opens and clickthroughs--cannot be easily correlated with the sales pipeline. These measurements have been deemed insufficient.

Today, savvy marketers have turned their attention to a new mantra: demand generation, the integration of email marketing, web analytics, data marts and CRM into a single platform. Email marketing can no longer stand on its own.

A more comprehensive approach

Email, in definition, is simply a channel for reaching a particular audience. Used independently of other tactics, it is a channel that is increasingly difficult to navigate. CAN-SPAM regulations, robust filtering technologies, and the dramatic growth in email volume have made it harder to get your message through. Clearly, email needs help.

In sophisticated marketing organizations, email is only one of many tactics used to drive demand. Email campaigns are carefully choreographed with a variety of other channels and programs like search keywords, public relations, direct mail, advertising, and telemarketing. To make this all work, marketers rely on comprehensive, integrated data that delivers quantifiable results. While this data can come from distinct products, it is organized, manipulated, and analyzed in a common data mart on a common software platform. This integrated demand generation platform combines prospect segmentation, analytics and profiling with traditional marketing channels like email, website forms and analytics, search words, direct mail, chat, and others.

Typical email data, such as email opens and clickthroughs, is easy to capture. However, without other information, its value is low. Demand generation experts need higher value data on prospect behavior. They need to know which campaigns triggered which responses, how the responses varied by channel, the click-stream for each prospect visit to a web site, the rate of change in web activity and, if available, the search queries that resulted in the visit. Using this data, marketers can assemble a rich prospect profile that shows interest and intent over time.

Making email relevant again

Pulling high-volume prospect behavior data from stove-piped email, web analytics, data marts, and CRM is difficult and costly. Only when these functions are integrated across a common software platform can the marketer begin to truly obtain useful information. The demand generation platform lets marketers move from 'batch and blast' email to sophisticated applications like lead scoring and workflow automation. It enables marketers to improve lead conversion rates at the top end of the funnel. It produces better qualified leads with deep analytics and segmentation. It smoothes the handoff of leads from marketing to sales through deep CRM integration and automated notifications. It produces a higher yield of recycled leads as companies continue to intelligently track and market to prospects that are still too early in the buying cycle. Most importantly, the demand generation platform allows marketers to finally map initial email response through the entire funnel to deal signature, delivering on the long-awaited promise of closed-loop marketing.

Email still represents one of the best values in the marketing arsenal. Great results can be delivered when coupled with other marketing techniques and channels, including: prospect profiling and segmentation to target the right audience with the right message; dynamic landing pages to move people to action; analytics and reporting to gather prospect interest and intent; and marketing automation to relentlessly educate, nurture, and qualify sales leads.

Marketers and executives at small and large organizations looking to reinvigorate their marketing campaigns must look beyond standalone email and adopt a more comprehensive solution. New demand generation platforms offer the power and flexibility of standalone email packages, and include reporting, analytics, and visibility that make email relevant again.

Online Marketing Predictions for 2006

MediaBuyerPlanner.com

Earlier this week, ClickZ's Zach Rogers asked some "big brains" to provide their thoughts on what the next year might hold for online marketing, including creative, RSS, video, search, and mobile, MarketingVOX reports. John Rich, Interactive Creative Director at TM, points to greater consumer influence and also foresees "a huge impact" by Flash 8. Dick Costolo, CEO of FeedBurner, sees greater sophistication in the tools for managing and measuring RSS subscriptions and reach; also, he says, look for a breakout campaign using podcasts.

Chris Young, Klipmart CEO, sees a greater shift from TV: "We're going to see a lot of video assets move online." And the in-stream video ad inventory shortage will remain a problem, he tells ClickZ.

John Lustina, Chairman of IntraPromote, says of search: "PPC just keeps getting bigger." But he sees local advertisers taking a little longer to jump in. Trevor Hughes, Executive Director of the ESPC, says third-party relationships, particularly affiliate marketing structures, will grow more risky and come under greater scrutiny.

Regarding email, Epsilon Interactive CEO Al DiGuido says "2006 is going to be the year the top-tier players leverage what they have in their customer databases...kind of a segment-of-one communication, as opposed to geographic or psychographic segmentation."

Nihal Mehta, CEO of ipsh!, says mobile will see campaigns that mix print, online, radio, street marketing, events... Mobile coupons will expand and SMBs will begin using mobile marketing.