Available email marketing techniques have matured from simple to multivariable. Here's what you stand to lose if you're not keeping up with the times.

With a seemingly infinite amount of spam, enewsletters and offers in our inboxes, email can be difficult to trust and easy to ignore. Hackers and counterfeiters are posing as legitimate businesses and organizations; thus, familiarity is no longer enough of an impetus for opening an email.

As mailboxes become an increasingly cluttered channel for reaching customers, clickthroughs are becoming more difficult to attract. While there have been advances in scenario-based web design created to track consumers' online behavior and build profiles, or personas, for targeted marketing and advertising, batch-and-blast campaigns sent by stove-piped email applications and outsourced email service providers are still as prevalent as ever. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then why are misguided emails, born without knowledge of each customer, still being delivered in abundance?

There are two important things marketers can do to evolve their email strategies and improve interactions with customers and prospects. One is to improve the personalization within the emails themselves, and the other is to better coordinate these emails with other channels such as direct mail, phone and mobile.

Moving from simple to multivariable email marketing
Email marketing is evolving from simple approaches to more behaviorally based multivariable, or dynamic, approaches. Simple email marketing is just what it sounds like: A customer buys sneakers on a website and subsequently receives an email offer for a 15 percent discount on that person's next purchase, with an expiration date accompanying the coupon. If the customer does not use the coupon before expiration, he or she receives another discount offer, followed by another, independent of whether they ever take any action. That is simple... too simple.

Multivariable, or dynamic, email marketing relies on multiple components to determine the next marketing step, including data obtained from user profiles and actual user behavior. For example, suppose a customer visits a women's clothing website where she has previously made a purchase. She clicks through a couple of pages, spends extra time on a page with shoes, taking a closer look at specific styles and colors, but then leaves the site without buying. This time, the customer is treated to an email offering a discount (her user profile is already in the system) on a pair of shoes -- buy one get one half-off -- promoting just the style she spent the most time viewing.

A good example of the success that multivariable marketing can bring is a recent marketing campaign by Confetti, an online wedding and special occasion web, retail and mail order business. This year, Confetti replaced its external email services provider with an enterprise marketing platform in order to automate the personalization of each email based on specific customer history and demographics. Confetti's consumer campaign impressively achieved an opening rate of 32.58 percent, a clickthrough rate of 10.27 percent, a reactivity rate of 22.27 percent and a conversion rate of 1.3 percent. The personalized email offered each customer products that Confetti considered relevant to their individual needs. As a result, the average order value was up by 85 percent on the benchmark Confetti had set for such campaigns with its email service provider. This example shows that by addressing specific needs that customers have indicated through their behavior, multivariable marketing is a far cry from sending a thousand shots in the dark through batch-and-blast email.

Maturing from multi-channel to cross-channel marketing
What is perhaps more wasteful than using simple email marketing is the use of email campaigns that are not well-coordinated with direct mail, telemarketing or mobile initiatives. Disparate technology systems, often located both in-house and at vendor sites, make it difficult to track interactions. In addition, multiple, disconnected communications can leave customers and prospects feeling angry and frustrated.

Coordination and consistency are very important -- imagine a customer's reaction to receiving two different offers from a triple-play telephone/cable/internet provider. One arrives by direct mail and offers a bundle of all three services for $99 per month. One arrives via email and offers the same bundle at $99 per month plus as an additional incentive, a free HDTV. The consumer calls the toll-free number on the mailed postcard and asks about the email offer. The call center agent isn't aware of the HDTV offer and cannot honor it. The customer is annoyed and, believing the experience may be symbolic of the type of service she can expect should she switch, decides to remain with her current provider.

Situations like this arise when companies take a multi-channel marketing approach versus a cross-channel marketing approach. "Multi-channel" infers the ability to drive marketing through multiple channels -- something most marketers have certainly achieved. Meanwhile, "cross-channel" denotes the ability to drive the coordination and consistency of a campaign's message across channels.

Initiating the email evolution
The use of multivariable email marketing within a broader cross-channel marketing effort is essential for optimizing your marketing campaign. Batch-and-blast email campaigns orchestrated via stove-piped email applications and outsourced email service providers do not offer the flexibility to handle the more complex personalization techniques for multivariable email marketing, nor do they provide any knowledge of past communications via alternate channels to enable the execution of cross-channel marketing.

As companies ultimately decide to manage email marketing in-house, they should consider deploying a cross-channel marketing platform that will enable the creation of comprehensive campaigns that are replicated across various channels, allowing more personalized emails that are also tightly coordinated with alternative communications. Perhaps most importantly, this technology provides the ability to track and analyze customer behaviors across all channels, so that a holistic knowledge of the customer can be utilized for each email communication.

Stephan Dietrich is president of enterprise marketing software provider Neolane Inc.