BrightWave's Simms Jenkins and Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey talk CAN-SPAM, RSS, blogs and more in the conclusion to their interview.
Editor's note: you can read the first half of this interview here.
Bill Nussey is the President and CEO of Silverpop, a leading provider of permission-based email marketing solutions, strategy and services. Ranked as having the highest business value and richest feature set by JupiterResearch in 2004, Silverpop was also acknowledged by research company Forrester as a "strong performer" that "stands out with an interface that is quite easy to use while providing strong functionality."
Before joining Silverpop, Nussey was President and CEO of iXL, Inc., a publicly traded e-business consulting firm. During his three-year tenure, iXL executed its initial public offering, increased revenues from $10 million to $120 million per quarter and grew from 400 to over 2,000 employees. Nussey has also served as an investment professional with the venture capital firm Greylock Management Corporation. He co-founded and was CEO of DaVinci Systems, an award-winning email software company.
Simms Jenkins: As someone who has been involved with email marketing since its infancy as a commercial medium, you have seen the business change and mature. What will this industry look like in five and 10 years?
Bill Nussey: Let’s look at the trends. Most of my friends with teenagers tell me that instant messaging dominates their kids' online communications and that email is a legacy tool for talking with grandparents. On the wireless front, virtually every aspect of computing will be available from any place on earth at any time in just a few years.
In the not-too-distant future, email marketing won’t be “email marketing;” it will be digital direct marketing. It will be about reaching out at the right time with the right message over whichever medium the recipient wants. More importantly, the future will not be limited to the right time and right medium, it will also include the right place – the world of location-based marketing is just around the corner.
Looking forward, I also get very excited about the increasing power of the tools that marketers will have available to them. Analyzing, segmenting and automating communications will become increasingly available even to the most non-technical marketers. The costs of developing these kinds of campaigns will drop; the technical barriers will go down and, if we’re lucky, truly relevant communications will become as common-place as blasting is today.
Jenkins: Do you have any recent case studies or examples that shed light on how effective email marketing is and can be, if done correctly?
Nussey: There are countless examples, but I want to highlight two. The first case study is simply about improving blocking and tackling -- doing the basics better.
The company, Fossil, a watch and apparel retailer, wanted to overhaul its email program, improving every aspect of it from deliverability to better segmentation and personalized content. My company, Silverpop, helped put together new processes and helped Fossil to transition over to our campaign tools. After just a few months of having its new processes and tools in place, Fossil was able to drive its holiday revenues from the email channel three times higher than the year prior.
The second case study is about the impact of adding very sophisticated technology and processes to an otherwise-mature email program. HoneyBaked Ham, working with interactive marketing and technology company Spunlogic, was able to take its already successful email program to an entirely new level. Working with my company’s tools, Spunlogic and HoneyBaked designed a multi-recipient, multi-order, dynamic and highly-personalized email for its corporate gift-givers. Taking data from last year’s sales, an email was created that personally addressed each recipient, showed that person's exact order from last year and allowed him or her to simply click on a link to send the same order again.
HoneyBaked saw unprecedented results with this campaign. One email using Silverpop resulted in sales that were 15 times greater than the previous year, produced a six-and-a-half percent conversion rate with an average order size that was 50 percent larger. This was the most successful holiday email campaign in the company’s history.
Jenkins: I know many of our clients focus on the campaign metrics and judge the success of their program often on these stats alone? Do you have any advice on how metrics should be and should not be used?
Nussey: Metrics are essential and, frankly, they are what make email marketing unique. Email is more measurable than any other marketing medium available to marketers. That being said, the things we measure need to be re-examined as the medium (and consumer behavior) change and evolve.
First, the open rate is moving from a measure of subject line success to a measure of a company’s online brand. The subject line does remain important, but marketers need to shift their open rate attention toward the "From" field, which is the way online brand manifests itself in email.
Open rates are also being impacted on the technical front because of image suppression in most modern web and desktop email programs. Don’t be surprised or alarmed if your open rates are dropping two to three points per quarter. Assuming clickrates remain consistent, such drops are probably the effect of image suppression rather than a lack of interest in your brand. However, if both click and open rates are going down, you may be seeing a drop in the perceived value of your email program.
Second, metrics no longer can be viewed purely on a per-campaign basis. The cumulative effect of your emails' relevance, both good and bad, will drive the response rates on future campaigns.
Third, metrics will vary wildly depending on what you’re trying to do with your campaigns. A two percent clickthrough rate would be fantastic if your newsletter has the complete articles within the email message, but a 10 percent clickrate would be terrible if you were offering a 50 percent-off sale to a highly targeted audience. Although it’s a popular practice by many ESPs, I think it’s dangerous to generalize response numbers overall or by industry.
Jenkins: I know you use a blog and RSS feeds. What is your opinion on how these compare to email marketing and how they compliment or contrast against it as a marketing channel?
Nussey: As most marketers are aware, RSS is a technology for delivering blogs to a newsreader. In this regard, RSS is just like SMTP, the technology for delivering email messages. In a very real way, RSS and SMTP are just two similar technologies for pushing various kinds of online content. In my view, these will eventually become interchangeable and largely invisible to end users.
The real challenge in email marketing, blogs or any kind of push marketing is the content management, sophisticated personalization, analytics and response management. Virtually every marketer has adopted one set of tools or another to manage all these complexities. In contrast, the actual technical challenges of email and blog delivery are fairly minor.
However, in comparing blogs to email we are talking about an entirely new form of communication that will likely have a big impact on traditional publishing and broadcasting. Blogs merge word-of-mouth marketing with traditional advertising and direct marketing. Few blogs will get the readership of The New York Times, but in aggregate, the blogosphere will become a massive force driving public perception and opinion of various issues. And in some ways, it’s much harder for blogs as a whole to reflect the biases of a few. Therefore, the blogosphere is likely to become a far more accurate reflection of the true opinions of the U.S. and world communities. I think blogging is just starting as a medium and, like the world wide web, it will reshape a lot of how we as marketers work today.
Jenkins: Do you think CAN-SPAM is working?
Nussey: CAN-SPAM is most definitely having an impact. For example, the self-proclaimed "Spam King" Scott Richter has filed for bankruptcy after lawsuits filed by Microsoft and New York state. Meanwhile, a North Carolina spammer was sentenced to nine years in prison for spamming. And a man known as the "Buffalo Spammer" was found guilty on 14 counts.
When I was conducting research for my book, I interviewed the co-author of the CAN-SPAM legislation, Senator Conrad Burns. His point was that CAN-SPAM wasn’t trying to stop spam but simply regulate it. He said, “Listen, I watch TV. I wish I didn’t have to see those ads, but advertising is just a fact of the medium.”
The point is that commercial email and, to some degree email advertising, are facts of life. Criminals will always exist, and with them, so will unscrupulous and illegal emails. But I think the biggest outcry surrounding spam resulted more because people just weren't used to it. All the latest studies now show that consumers are getting used to spam and figuring out how to work around it. It is a sad comment that something so unwelcome must become a fact of life, but virtually every communications channel in history has brought with it both powerful benefits and unfortunate abuses.
The bottom line is that legislation coupled with technology is making a dent in spam. The laws don’t need to stop it; they just need to make it manageable enough so that it doesn’t drive email into uselessness. Personally, I think the improvements are well underway and I believe things will only get better from here on out.
Jenkins: Do you think the email marketing industry as a whole is taking the proper leadership moves to ensure future success for its constituents?
Nussey: I have been impressed with my industry’s reaction to the various challenges -- both external and internal -- that have confronted it. In particular, I applaud the efforts of our industry’s primary trade group, the Email Service Provider Coalition (ESPC). My company is an active member of the ESPC, and in my view this group has done a tremendous job of providing leadership and a common voice for our industry. ESPC members are present at virtually every legislative hearing on email. And, even more positively, I think the vast majority of people would be pleasantly surprised and supportive of the conservative, pro-consumer view that this group espouses.
Jenkins: Finally, what is the next big thing in email marketing, and will email ever become more than a quiet revolution?
Nussey: The next big thing is already starting, but I am going to keep that one to myself. Some revolutions are best kept quiet for a little while at least.
G. Simms Jenkins is Founder and Principal of BrightWave Marketing, an Atlanta-based email marketing and customer relationship services firm. He has extensive relationship marketing experience on both the client and agency side. Jenkins has led BrightWave Marketing in establishing a large client list, including marquee clients like GMAC Insurance, CoreNet Global and The Atlanta Journal - Constitution. BrightWave Marketing has become a leader in the Email Marketing outsourcing space by using their expertise in strategy, design, list management, segmenting, delivery and analysis. Jenkins has been recognized by many media outlets as an Email Marketing and CAN-SPAM expert. Prior to BrightWave Marketing, Jenkins was Director of Business Development at two high-tech start-ups and headed the CRM group at Cox Interactive Media, a unit of media giant Cox Enterprises.