The president of Acceleration eMarketing urges marketers to move their knowledge and efforts forward to deploy more strategic email programs.

It is amazing to see how many consumer email marketers still rely almost entirely on newsletters as the vehicle for their outbound customer communications. Newsletters are quite useful in B2B marketing (I read at least 10 a day), but they are a particularly poor format for consumer communications. The default newsletter is sent monthly, superficially personalized and customized (if at all), to a stale base, and has no context (time or event) that makes it relevant to the consumer.

So why, in late 2005, with so many good ESPs, agencies, consultants and client-side email marketers in the industry is this still the case?

What everyone is writing about

A quick scan of the email marketing articles that were published in iMedia Connection since the summer gives one the impression that the number one issue in our industry is deliverability and regulatory compliance (virtually every article offered advice on how to master one of these two problems). While I agree that they are important issues to resolve for all email marketers, I would argue that they are problems which can be easily solved. That’s why all the email marketing experts are writing about these topics: they already have solutions to offer. And, if you are a legitimate corporate marketer who took deliverability and compliance seriously enough two years ago when it first became a problem, it should no longer be a major problem for you. 

But deliverability and compliance (and their evil cousin, spam) have been major distractions for the email marketing industry over the past two years. In fact, the industry has been on the verge of crisis due to spam, to the point at which email marketers have been focusing on little else.

What no one is writing about

What no one is writing about is that there is a massive lack of expertise in our industry. Specifically, the expertise that is required to design relevant, innovative and complex email marketing programs. Many email marketers can tell you about open rates, soft and hard bounces, do conversion tracking, mail from branded DNSs and dedicated IPs et cetera, but very few can design an end-to-end email marketing program from a strategic point of view. Even fewer can also implement a complex program so that it does not become an operational nightmare with costs far outstripping the benefits.

A lack of theory

The main problem is that there is a massive lack of knowledge and thinking about email marketing program design. Many marketers spend hours gathering content and compiling newsletters, but very few ever sit down to think what kinds of email communications will be relevant to their consumers. What personalized or customized content should they contain? And what customer actions or lifecycle events will trigger these communications? The answers to these questions will differ for each industry and for each marketer, but one thing is clear: one-size-fits-all monthly newsletters are never the answer.

The smartest email marketers have developed comprehensive email messaging matrices that plot all their email communications, the triggers and the frequency. And as the user experience becomes more relevant, more personal and more timely, so these messaging matrices become increasingly complex.

The gap between theory and execution

But even if you know how to design an email marketing program, most marketers cannot deploy their ideal program on an operational level. It is simple to deploy a monthly newsletter manually, but when you want to send millions of unique emails at different intervals to different users 365/24/7, manual email compilation and deployment is no longer an option. You need a technology solution.

A high level of technical integration is required between a marketer’s existing systems and their email tool, and often a middleware layer is required to automate the deployment of all the various event- and lifecycle-triggered messages. And the reality is that the skills to do this integration and automation work are sorely lacking in our industry. The high-end ESPs are doing their best to make their tools powerful and flexible, but even the best ones require a significant amount of technical integration to really make a program work.

Conclusion

So why are marketers still sending newsletters?

• They’ve been too busy dealing with spam, deliverability and compliance to think of anything else
• They don’t have the training, experience or will to design a comprehensive email messaging matrix
• They don’t have the technical expertise or resources to implement these programs so that they run in an automated and efficient way.

We need to stop sending default newsletters for email marketing to flourish and remain relevant to consumers. Start designing your program today and hire or buy the resources to integrate and automate technically.

Stephan Pretorius founded Acceleration in 1999 and is currently responsible for product development and strategy. Prior to Acceleration, Pretorious worked in M-Net Strategic Development team where he founded Oracle Online Sales in 1997. He holds a BA, LLB from WITS and an LLM from Columbia University.