I must say, of all breakout sessions at the MIMA event today, “The Changing Face of Email” session was the one I was most excited to attend as it ties into what I love to do – email marketing. Thankfully I didn’t have to wait long to dive right in as it was part of the Summit Kick-Off Breakout session: Deep Dive Discussion Series.
Jamie Schissler, Strategy Director at Avenue A – Razorfish, the presenter for “The Changing Face of Email” session shared with the MIMA audience that as the role of email evolves, so too will its impact.
So why will the email marketing strategies of yesterday not work for email marketing success today?
A few key answers and issues that were stressed in the session that and I would like to focus on in order to answer this question were:
- Deliverability
- Test & Measure
There are far more distractions as well as competition than in past years with social, mobile, and other technologies. Additionally, there is the deliverability challenge caused by the ever changing list. With roughly 20% of people changing email addresses each year to avoid spam and/or to start “fresh” and escape the email account that has gotten out of control, it is difficult to keep in touch with your opt-in audience.
Another deliverability challenge is the growing number of savvy email recipients that believe that a good way to unsubscribe to an email is to simply click the “spam button” and in essence eliminating your reach to that person going forward. (Of course it is key to deliver content that is important to recipient to avoid your audience from opting-out.)
Deliverability of email messages to the mobile device users is also going to be a growing challenge since messages displayed on mobile devices will look, feel and likely interact with the recipient differently than when viewed within a traditional email account.
As can be expected, with the deliverability issues noted above, reaching the target audience is and will become more difficult in the future. However, through careful monitoring and adjusting to the audience that is responding, as well as those that are not responding, it will be possible to achieve successful results to email marketing programs.
Test & Measure:
To understand the success or failure of an email campaign it is imperative to look at the results of email campaigns to learn from for future campaigns.
From standard statistics such as opens, click throughs, opt-outs, etc. to more of a “total reach” analysis of who is opening, who is clicking and how will the campaigns move the products/services marketed.
Measuring the frequency of campaigns, and whether or not there are more opt-outs when campaigns are sent weekly versus monthly or daily, is an area to focus analysis on. Adjusting the frequency of the campaign accordingly and continuing to test and monitor the results will hone the right frequency mix for your company.
Analysis of email campaigns stats in conjunction with web statistics (whether it be with free analytics packages such as Google Analytics, or with paid packages such as Omniture) is also very important to the success of your email marketing program.
As Jamie Schissler concluded, he showed a slide of many different kinds/styles/sizes of shoes and to remind the audience that everyone can’t walk in everyone else’s shoes and that everyone’s email marketing experience will be different. Embrace the change we are experiencing in email marketing and make that change work for you!
