Every once in a while, there’s a dark side to opining. After last week’s Loose Cannon on e-mail marketing’s lack of basic recency, frequency and monetary segmentation, I was blindsided by an irate stranger at a local watering hole.
He said he recognized my picture from DIRECT’s Web site. "You’re the guy who wrote that column about e-mail and RFM, aren’t you?" he asked, although he didn’t say "guy" and he didn’t say "column."
He began absently chewing the neck off a bottle of Milwaukee’s finest. "Do you really believe that stuff about spending to segment e-mail messages? Once you lay out the cash for the creative, and you have e-mail addresses of customers, the incremental transmission costs of a mass e-mail blast don’t make investing in segmenting worthwhile," he said.
Now, I am not normally in the habit of arguing with Neanderthal no-necks who can both expound on direct marketing and ingest glass shards without harm, but that evening I was emboldened by return-on-investment righteousness and four fingers of Kentucky sour mash.
"That column dealt with messages sent to existing customers," I said. "It assumes marketers have some useful information on ‘em. What I had in mind should be easy to generate: If recency is greater than six months, marketers should send out a special reminder letter. Spread out over time, the incremental costs of database segmentation and programming a trigger campaign should be negligible."
Negligible, by the way, is a hard word to say with a tongue numbed by bourbon.
He began scribbling numbers on a pink cocktail napkin. "If postal communication has an incremental cost of around $600 per thousand once the initial campaign is set, e-mail campaigns have an incremental cost of maybe $2 per thousand." He waved his pink napkin at me. "For e-mail, with virtually no costs, any additional sale is like a donation to the top line."
He finished with a flourish. "If it doesn't cost anything, what with transmission expenses approaching zero, then sending another 1 -- or 10,000 – efforts with the possibility of a sale smells sweet to the CFO."
I thought I had him then. "Wouldn’t sending a more relevant effort to 5,000 people that adds two sales for an initial investment slightly larger than zero smell even sweeter?"
And then I delivered my coup de grace: "But all this assumes that e-mailers know RFM, and have faith -- confirmed through testing -- that segmented messaging works."
He grinned and handed me his card, which listed his position at a very traditional catalog firm. He began to negotiate his way off his barstool. "Education is key. Marketers and retailers who ignore segmenting and send out e-mail as if they were putting flyers on windshields are what keeps oldsters like us in business," he said, although he didn’t say "oldsters."
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact rlevey@primediabusiness.com
