Special Delivery: E-Mail Marketers Look Ahead To 2008

OLRICH: One of the bigger things is that most e-mail marketers have done a terrible job at using traditional direct marketing tactics like segmenting, RFM and lifetime value analysis. The reason they've done a terrible job is e-mail doesn't cost them anything, so they just send it out. What we've found is that not enough customers are doing basic segmentation. I'm seeing a lot of development in real-time offer management and segmentation based on business rules without the marketer having to do anything. There's going to be huge development in the automation of that [activity]. You'll get a feed and it will automatically, in e-mail, [determine] what the best offer is. We're going to move beyond segmentation and into offer management.

DIRECT: What are the biggest challenges and opportunities facing e-mail marketers going into 2008?

NUSSEY: Deliverability's getting funky again. The ISPs made their first pass at authentication and did virtually nothing with it. But what we've seen in our talks with the ISPs is that they're about to step up seriously in the next couple of quarters over how they view authentication. And of course, each ISP has a completely different technique and requirement, which I guess raises the value of ESPs because they can invest in these techniques and share them across many different clients. If you ask e-mail marketers if content matters in spam filters, 90% of them are going to say yes. Yet all the studies show that [only] a tiny amount of filtering is done on content these days. It's all done on reputation. So you have all these well-intentioned people whose lives depend on doing deliverability well and who are simply misinformed about the way things have shifted.

RIVERA: There clearly is no 'easy' button for deliverability. You can't just say 'I'll pay Goodmail or Habeas' because at the end of the day so much of it is driven by best practices.

DIRECT: Absolutely. Much of what determines whether or not you get in the inbox is how you handle your own list.

RIVERA: Yes, and I think marketers are starting to realize that. One of things people should consider is blowing up their e-mail programs. Re-opting in your list may be a good thing, and getting rid of people who don't respond may be a very good thing. That may partially solve your reputation issues. Determining what to do to an e-mail program is obviously going to be different for each company. It's about realizing that just because your e-mail has worked for the last three or four years doesn't necessarily mean it's OK.

ROBINSON-PRIDEMORE: By and large e-mail marketers are tired of talking about deliverability, and they're tired of all the vendors making deliverability promises. So many vendors have come out and said 'We've got the thing that's going to solve the problem of getting your e-mail delivered.' And e-mail marketers are wise to the fact that no vendor has the magic bullet that's going to get them delivered across every ISP. Vendors can make sure the technology side of it is as optimal as possible, but they can't ensure delivery when you still have the variables the e-mail marketer is responsible for, such as list practices.

DIRECT: If you could change one thing your clients do, what would it be?

RIVERA: The biggest thing customers do is they become accustomed to 'This works.' If you were a company growing at, say, 5%, would your investors be satisfied with that? No. That's the way I would describe e-mail marketing today. The people who're using it are content with the results they're getting. But if they just started segmenting, for example, they'd get a much better return on investment.

ROBINSON-PRIDEMORE: I wish they'd spend more time on the strategy behind how they message. And I wish they'd spend more time on the strategy behind how they integrate this channel with others, as well as how to optimize the channel.

OLRICH: I would like them to think about a program approach vs. a campaign approach. When E-Loan, for example, found that people were abandoning mortgage applications, it didn't say 'Let's just send a campaign to them.' [Instead,] E-Loan automated a program where it sends an e-mail to [mortgage applicants] 30 minutes after they abandon. If they don't respond, another e-mail goes out in seven days. And if they don't respond to that, it sends a print-on-demand piece. That's a program across the life cycle. The best marketers in our client base are the ones that have adopted that approach.