Return on Intention

Advertising, and marketing communications are generally viewed as an unwanted intruder. If you get it in your mail box it’s called junk mail. If you get it in your email it’ s spam. This view is not based on marketing communications being inherently bad, but rather it has come about from years of marketers and communication professionals sending irrelevant messages to us. If it’s irrelevant it becomes irritating. Basically, as marketers we have done this to ourselves. Most often I don’t think this was done intentionally and certainly not maliciously, but rather because we had mass media, so we got used to (and rewarded) for getting the message out to as many people as possible. The industry got too focused on quantity over quality.

Email is a great example. Email is so easy and inexpensive to use that spam has gotten out of control. When you are judged by the size of your list it becomes more important to blast out to 5 million than it is to blast to the 5 thousand that should get it.  As it stands, email is a fantastic medium. Social media is the new hot thing, but you don’t always want to talk about doing business in the middle of the party. Look at email as “Private Media”, the corner of the room where you and your buddy go to get away from the rest of the party just for a few seconds to really engage with each other. Email can be powerful, but not if its just a conduit for spam. Here is how to make sure you do it right.

Clean your list

Forget quantity. Go for quality. Look at your open rates and systematically cut out the bottom 10%. If they aren’t opening your emails then sending it to them makes no sense. Its a good idea to send them a plain text only email first, making sure they still want to be on the list. If they don’t, or don’t respond, remove them.

Segment your list

Not all your customers are the same. There are groups in your list that  have different interests. Segmenting your lists, and then sending different emails to each group that has more of the types of content they want will make your email more valuable to them. When the information is valuable, then its not considered spam. This is easiest, and most overlooked part of good email marketing, but it can make all the difference in the world.

Tags: email, segmentation, spam

This entry was posted on Monday, January 11th, 2010 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Doin' it right, Mar Comm, The Wild Wild Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.