The carefree days of email marketing’s youth were spent blasting emails to as many people as possible. What a party that was – sort of a combination of pledge week and Spring Break. Email was and is cheap to send. And in the past, email campaigns just seemed to make money, no matter how poor the methodology, and that sure looked good compared to the other marketing channels.
One-to-one marketing: Dream or wasted effort?
Posted by Bart Schaefer - January 22nd, 2009
Better informed marketing campaigns can be watershed events for many businesses, but keep it simple and stick to modest goals if you want to see them through.
Too often email marketers try to go from one end of the segmentation spectrum (blast away) to the other end (micro-segmentation). This extreme swing often bogs them down and, even if they are able to pull it off, often doesn’t yield better results than a simple, macro segmentation approach. After all, most marketing teams are stretched thin and stressed out in today’s crazy economy.
Practical Tips for Holiday Success
Posted by Craig Kerr - December 18th, 2008
The best thing you can give yourself and your company for the holidays is the gift of practical segmentation – a gift that keeps on giving, especially when it comes to profits in a tough market.
In the current economic climate, the shrewd email marketer has an opportunity to be the hero who helps the business stay afloat and even thrive. While many email marketers long to be able to segment their lists into thousands of mini-segments to conduct true one-to-one marketing, now is the time to stop dreaming and get practical.
In my iTiki bylines I give advice on such topics as:
Email Postage: Payment and Responsibility
Posted by Bart Schaefer - November 22nd, 2008
If an ISP were to charge a fee for delivery of email to its users, what expectations would you have about the success of that delivery?
Brian Krebs of the Washington Post reported recently on a study by University researchers in California that dissects some of the economics of spam email. Although it presents a sobering picture of the gullibility of the average email recipient, it also suggests that the return on a spammer’s email blast is much lower than previous estimates. It takes about a billion messages to get a return of less than $10,000.
How to Use E-Mail in a Down Market
Posted by Bart Schaefer - November 16th, 2008
In my Catalog Success byline I give an overview of how this is the time for email marketers to act like a sharp businessperson and consolidate their own standing in the process. I give practical tips on metrics, segmentation and talking the higher level biz talk.
One of email’s assets – it is a cheap channel – can also be a trap that blocks email marketers from using real business metrics and employing savvy methodologies such as segmentation.
Customer Flavors
Posted by Bart Schaefer - November 13th, 2008
Kevin Hillstrom draws some interesting boxes around his five flavors of customers. Since we do retention marketing, we at iPost almost exclusively focus on the brand-aware customer boxes (Kevin’s “organic” and “begging” buyers). It’s a great place to be, since we leverage that opt-in permission to generate 40x – 50x ROI in the email channel for our clients.
But we can even do quite a bit better: if you could place all your email subscribers at opposite ends of a organic / begging spectrum, you’re able to:
- Stop discounting to the organic, brand-enthusiast customers (they’re going to respond strongly anyway)
A Love Affair Gone Way Wrong
Posted by Bart Schaefer - November 12th, 2008
Email marketers apparently just love to lower their margins and leave money on the table.
The mania for discounts is driven to a large degree by the standard practice of blasting emails to every possible email address. When presented with a business downturn, the Pavlovian response is to blast out discounts. The more discounts the merrier – too bad, though, about the impact on the bottom-line.
In reality, customers are not the same. Some will buy from you without regular discounts, some will buy from you with minimal discounts and some will require on-going discounts.
Standards Reborne – SMTP and the Internet Message Format
Posted by Bart Schaefer - October 1st, 2008
With remarkably little flag-waving1 the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) today published new updates to the venerable Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP, RFC5321) and Internet Message Format (RFC5322) standards. These documents are the most recent reflection of more than twenty-six years of effort that began when Jon Postel and Dave Crocker penned2 the early drafts of Request For Comments 821 and 822. Those standards created the email universe as we know it today, building on the cooperative structure I mentioned in an earlier post.
Receivers take advantage of “Store and Forward”, and so should senders
Posted by Bart Schaefer - August 13th, 2008
Recently I shed some light on what happens behind the scenes when an email message is sent on its way. The “store and forward” model is not a perfect guarantee of delivery, but is very robust in the face of temporary breakdowns. You may have noticed, however, that if a message has to be passed along through several “hops”, only the final “hop” can determine exactly when or even whether the message has reached its intended recipient. To deal with this, the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), the standard way to transmit email over the Internet, defines all the elements necessary to complete a successful transfer of email and to report either a temporary service interruption or a complete failure.
Is your email being “miscarried”?
Posted by Bart Schaefer - August 6th, 2008
Networking consultant Keith Moore doesn’t ask for return receipts to confirm that his email has been delivered. This is somewhat ironic, as he was co-author of the 1996 specification that generates a confirmation message when an e-mail safely reaches its destination server. Moore, an advocate of measures to confirm email delivery, is “frustrated because end users’ e-mail software still lacks the design capability to use the server-to-server messages about completed email delivery” without user intervention, reports the New York Times.
