Email marketer Lynn Moss reviews "The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing" by Bill Nussey.

Bill Nussey’s book is easy to follow and fun to read. If you don’t have a natural passion for email, the author’s enthusiasm is catchy and keeps you excited as you learn. "The Quiet Revolution in Email Marketing" is an excellent reference book with easy-to-relate-to examples. It helps those who are just starting out by detailing what you should aspire to. It helps those who have been in the business for awhile by providing an actionable plan to take your email marketing to the next level of success.

I especially like how the book is laid out: it includes a glossary of terms which I always find helpful; a bibliography, which is handy if you want further reading; and an index so that you can quickly find particular topics. And, you will want to refer to particular topics again and again as you progress with your email marketing programs.

Email marketing fundamentals are covered: types of permissions and lists; testing; delivery issues; and advanced techniques like dynamic content, behavior targeting and campaign automation.

The email technology chapter helps the beginner as well as the non-technical marketing campaign owners. I agree with Nussey’s statement that you need to understand the technology involved with the actual sending of the email and collecting the metrics so that you can accurately track success.

The different types of emails are presented and the importance of the classifications due to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, which affects your operations. Best Practices and statistics that are often quoted in webinars and White Papers across the industry are included; it is handy to have them all in one book to benchmark against.

The book’s title “The Quiet Revolution” stems from the fact that email is faster, more measurable, can be more personalized, and is certainly cheaper than other advertising mediums. But, it should not be thought of as a cheap communication tool or a simple mass media tactic.

It should be a powerful relationship tool that benefits customers. This is the crux of CCM or Customer Communication Management. Learn about your customers, look at them as individuals and focus on what is relevant to them. Then, your email campaigns become a savvy marketing and customer communications channel. Nussey calls it “The New Rules of Email Marketing.” And, this book does a good job of defining the rules.

There are three levels of email marketing sophistication. Concrete criteria exist for measuring your email program’s maturity. The level also tells you the complexity of the technology required to support your email program. More importantly than simply stating the different levels, the book gives you a clear understanding of how to get to the next level.

At the highest level of sophistication, you focus on the three Rs -- relevancy, recipient control, and relationships -- thereby increasing customer trust and lifetime value.

You believe that “it is your responsibility to be interesting and relevant to your customer.” You strive for ultra-precise targeting by studying customers’ past behaviors and stated interests.

You let your customer control the type and frequency of communications they receive from you.

You focus less on individual campaign results, and more on the lifetime value of the customer. You don’t think “advertising," instead, it’s “loyalty and communication.”

Tough questions are asked that challenge real-world attitudes: Do you spend more time trying to grow your list than trying to target your customers? Do you look at the value of email on a campaign-by-campaign basis, instead of the lifetime value of a customer?

Bottom line: you’ve learned how to use email correctly so that it affects the way you communicate and build relationships with customers.

The formula for Email Brand Value (EBV), discussed in the book, highlights how the emails your customers receive affect their perception of your company’s brand:

EBV = existing brand (+/-) relevancy + content value – frequency.

Relevancy, perceived value and frequency of each and every email your customer receives from you can positively or negatively affect his or her perception of your brand. “A great EBV is the result of consistent relevancy and value over the life of a customer relationship,” states Nussey.

A decisive factor for success that anyone struggles with in a large corporation is making email an enterprise initiative. It’s critical for implementation of strategy and governance. Nussey provides an outline for creating an email policy containing: strategy, process and execution, marketing objectives, managing permission, message content, infrastructure and working with third-party data.

The principles outlined in the sections “Deliverability 101” and “Renderability 101” are a comprehensive list of concepts that you need to understand and conquer in order to improve the success of your emails. As with any good book of this type, it also has a section on “The Future of Email Marketing.”

Be sure to check out the additional resources at http://www.quietrevolutioninemail.com/. The site has a free companion workbook that follows each chapter, asking questions about your email efforts in order to help drive home the concepts of the book. It also provides talking points for your discussions with peers and upper management to help you carry the message throughout your organization.

Lynn Moss is the Senior Manager in charge of Consumer Email Marketing for a Fortune 100 communications company. Her responsibilities currently include email strategy and email delivery assurance. Moss’ other responsibilities in the ecommerce space have included Compliance, Customer Experience and Web Services. Other positions held in the communications industry include Strategic Pricing, Strategic Planning and Marketing Strategy.