E-mail: A You-Suck-O-Meter for Your Brand
According to a recent survey by e-mail deliverability company Return Path, 55.9% of respondents cited knowing and trusting the sender as the primary reason they’ll open an e-mail, making familiarity and trust their No. 1 consideration.
In the same survey, 51.2% cited previously opening an e-mail from the sender and finding it valuable as a the top reason for opening a message, making the marketer’s previous behavior the No.2 consideration.
Meanwhile, 20% cited discounts and 17.5% named free shipping offers as primary influencers, a significant percentage, no doubt, but significantly less than the familiarity and comfort factors cited above.
What to make of this? For one thing, these figures indicate marketers don’t have to hammer their margins into oblivion to compete online.
More importantly, however, these results indicate the possibility that e-mail may be a barometer for a company’s brand: Call it a You Suck-O-Meter.
Before recipients decide if they even want to engage you in their e-mail box, the top things they consider are: Do they know you? Do they trust you? And did they have a good experience last time they dealt with you?
As a result, if an e-mail campaign performs poorly, it may not be anything in the current message driving the metrics down. It could be something in the last campaign, something in the last five campaigns, or your e-mail program overall. Maybe you’re sending too many. Maybe your e-mail has sucked for a while.
Even more scary, if an e-mail program begins to show signs of overall failure—declining click-throughs, conversions, etc.—it may not be the e-mail program that is turning people off.
It could be lousy customer service, or that completely unqualified guy who just took over managing the warehouse. Or maybe, an e-mail program’s low performance is just the leading indicator of the general crap coming out of the marketing department. Granted, the CFO could be forcing too many tin-ear ideas into the company’s marketing mix, as is often the case with those in senior management who never think beyond banging in an immediate sale.
The point is e-mail programs don’t take place in a marketing vacuum. Yet they’re treated as if they do.
E-mail accounts for a minuscule percent of the average CMO’s budget and gets a corresponding amount of attention.
But if nothing else, e-mail’s performance is an indicator of how people who have agreed to let the company communicate with them in an extremely personal medium feel about the way a particular brand is performing within that channel.
Yet, company after company uses the channel for clearance blasts and the like—each message stuffed with 99 pitches or products because the committee in charge can’t get its message straight.
And when recipients say, in essence: “You suck,” the marketers just keep right on going with the same tired effort because e-mail’s so cheap.
Before spending money on the next focus group, marketers may want to take a look at how their e-mail programs are performing. It could tell them a lot.
