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If you don't treat your email list with respect your whole brand image will suffer. Read on for pointers.
Spam, phishing, dropping open rates, deliverability issues and inbox overload. If you are in any way involved in the email marketing business, these are terms you will be more than familiar with. Many cynics are only too happy to dive in and use this as the basis for the proposition that "email is dead." Sure, these are issues that need to be dealt with, like issues in any other channel, but the channel is still relatively young and this is just the first hurdle. Let's not stumble here and give up before the race has even started.
You will also be familiar with those that say email is simply a "quick and dirty" medium that companies use in order to shortcut traditional techniques. Well there is one thing you can be sure of: If you are treating your email marketing channel as a "quick and dirty" fix, it will be read with about as much interest as that with which it was tossed together. And to think that the negative sentiment this communication might draw will be magically confined to the email channel is absurd. Why would you treat those customers that you respect in traditional media disrespectfully in email? For marketers who flaunt this rule, it's not your email channel you're killing, it's your customer and prospect base.
But for marketers who treat their email customers and prospects with respect, the channel is far from dead; it's thriving, and helping build solid relationships. You can have as many "Golden Rules" as you like but they all boil down to respect, and nowhere is this notion of respect more important than in the world of B2B marketing. Generally audiences are smaller, but don't let this mislead you. They might be smaller in number, but they are without doubt bigger in terms of buying power, and bombarding them with irrelevant, badly timed messages can be fatal.
To show respect, you as the marketer need to do your homework. As a responsible marketer, you need to get the right message to the right person, at the right time. If you get this right, everything else falls into place. Dropping open rates, declining response rates, inbox overload; all of these things become irrelevant if your messages have value.
Today, email programs must be built around the real needs of prospects and customers. Not what marketers think their needs are, or what they will be in three months time, but what their actual needs are today. This means that marketers need to listen to customers and prospects, all day, every day. Whether marketers like it or not, the power has shifted, customers and prospects are in control and they prove it to us everyday within ROI metrics.
For marketers who acknowledge and embrace this shift, inbox clutter and declining response rates become irrelevant. The effect is quite the opposite -- you become known as a marketer that listens, and one that has value to offer.
Your messages stand out against the clutter, and they are welcomed into inboxes -- read and responded to, too.
And for those that say that email is only a CRM tool, well I'm not so sure. All prospects go through a buying cycle prior to making a decision, but in the B2B world this is usually a more protracted, information hungry, thought-through process. How can an insightful, well-crafted and targeted series of email communications that provide relevant and timely information not be a good prospecting tool? I think the truth is that the confusion around this debate often comes in when you start looking at what people consider prospecting, and there is an important distinction between prospecting and SPAM. Gathering and maintaining the data of those who are in the buying cycle and receptive to receiving emailed information that can help them with their purchase decision is what I call prospecting. Buying a badly gathered cold list and sending those people a bulk mail, in my book, amounts to nothing more than SPAM.
Whenever I find myself in debate with email cynics, I try my best to explain the difference between "use of the email channel" and "abuse of the email channel." Bad use of email, like bad use of any channel is dead. You will always get those who abuse a channel, but they are quickly weeded out of the mix, usually blaming the channel for their failure and adding their name to the list of those proclaiming its death. For serious marketers, this is good news, as the email world is a better place for their departure.
In my experience, email used wisely and respectfully can be an extremely efficient and effective channel for marketers, customers and prospects alike.
Grant Keller is director for EMEA at Acceleration. Read full bio.
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