Once Upon A Time…
Once upon a time there was a Golden Goose, and its name was email. This fabulous creature could lay golden eggs because it enabled a whole new way to communicate with customers and prospects. Companies could not only send messages very inexpensively, but also quickly receive messages back. This opportunity for a dialogue and a real-time relationship with customers and prospects had never been possible before and made the Golden Goose enormously valuable. Up until this point, if you wanted to talk to your customers or if a prospect wanted to respond to your message, they had to pick up the phone or write you a letter. At that point, it was easy for you and easy for them and everyone was very happy.
But quickly a cloud appeared and cast its shadow over the Golden Goose, and the cloud's name was Blind Greed. Blind Greed made people think that, because email was so cheap, they could send lots for almost no cost. So companies started to send mass emails to almost everyone with (consequently) irrelevant offers and content. Only a tiny percentage of the people who received these emails were actually interested, so response rates plummeted.
However, because the ROI necessary for these emails was so low, nobody cared. And slowly the Golden Goose became less valuable. Irrelevant emails from trusted companies wasted people's time, so they stopped opening them. Slowly the Golden Goose started to die.
The Good News
Okay, enough with the Goose story, but you get the idea-- a lot of companies have abused email. They have essentially spammed their own customers. They have taken an amazing opportunity and, if not killed it, then certainly damaged its value. That's the bad news, but the good news is all is not lost. The goose may be sick, but with a little care, she can be back in business with the full potential that email has always had.
Stop and think about the dozens or hundreds of emails you get everyday. Most of them are a waste of your valuable time. They don't bring you any information or content of value, or are personally relevant to you. When a company starts doing that, you are probably like me and stop opening all emails from that company.
Respect the Channel
My company works with a number of Fortune 200 companies that have opt-in email lists where 90 percent or more of the recipients do not even open the emails anymore. How could this be? These are people who specifically took the effort to sign up for an email. What happened that would turn these people off so dramatically?
It's simple; the companies did not respect their email channel. They mailed irrelevant, self-serving content that wasted people's time, usually way too frequently. Company and brand newsletters have often been guilty of this as well. Instead of editorial with content integrity focused on their constituency of interest, they provide thinly-veiled advertising. However, most people have highly developed advertising detectors and can spot a wolf in sheep's clothing a mile away. That's one of the reasons traditional HTML newsletters (HTML denotes text and pictures similar to a print piece) have experienced declining open rates and clickthrough rates for years. Another reason is the experience itself.
Bringing the Goose Back to Life
Who has time to read the dozens of newsletters we receive every day? It's work and requires a motivated viewer. The web used to be a big print place, and we all had a lot more time to read. Today, we are all extremely time-compressed and have to make instantaneous decisions as to how to spend our time. If it doesn't instantly catch our attention, we're gone, especially with marketing. But the internet has also evolved from a print analogy to a TV analogy. That means that the web is now alive with sound and movement and has the ability, for the first time, to catch and hold our fickle attention. This makes new approaches and strategies to email and newsletters possible, and these are starting to bring the Golden Goose back to life.
Inventing a Better Way
It's common sense that how viewers feel about an email is affected by how relevant, compelling and entertaining it is. These feelings will determine if the next email they get from the same company is opened or not. In a nutshell, that's the challenge IBM undertook when it decided to invent a better way to communicate with its customers three years ago. Back then, broadband was already gaining solid traction in the business world (although not yet with homes), which led IBM to be open to taking advantage of the possibilities of broadband-- including rich media.
The rich media video newsletter that IBM launched, called ForwardView, became the precursor for the video communications starting to appear today. It featured short video/Flash stories, a host and reporters. Even back then, the rich media newsletter out delivered its traditional HTML newsletter that IBM immediately dropped HTML and converted to rich media. The cost was higher to produce these video stories, but the results were so much stronger that they justified the investment.
Rich Media Publishing
Three years later, ForwardView is still going strong, and has grown and prospered, while many regular newsletters have struggled. Part of this success has been the technology that runs the rich media-publishing platform. The technology allows for a degree of personalization that dramatically increases the relevancy of the newsletter. Each recipient receives a version of the newsletter, which is dynamically built, and each newsletter has different content, stories, links, headlines, et cetera. The technology also enables a CRM database containing customer profiles to run how the newsletter is presented to each customer. This enables a company's CRM communications to become more intelligent and more relevant over time-- resulting in an increasing response from viewers with remarkable results. IBM has tracked many business opportunities directly to ForwardView traffic, including one recently worth $12 million to $15 million. In fact, 15 percent of revenue generated through IBM's SMB website is influenced by the ForwardView newsletter. This newsletter provides editorial content that rarely (if ever) mentions IBM or IBM products-- successfully engendering editorial integrity and a loyal following as a result.
IBM's business-to-business video newsletter set the stage for what is now possible in the consumer world. In my next column, I'll discuss how Royal Caribbean has used rich media and a video newsletter to bring cruising to life for its customers and prospects.
