EMail Marketing: Let's focus on the email recipient

by Lee Chadwick, MD, Communigator, Revolution UK 04-Apr-07

Many organisations have been created to rid the world of spam. While much of the focus is given to emails selling size-enhancing narcotics, the real culprits are being overlooked.

As email marketing becomes more common, it is not unusual to see tens of
thousands of emails being churned out each month by even small
organisations - because they can. But the real problem is the lack of

relevance to the consumer. The issue of spam lies with lazy marketers,

not with the robotic narcotic sales emails.

Communigator has spent time and effort with its clients developing
preference engines that match current consumer or business needs with
content from the source. The important factor is that relevance is
constantly changing: what I am interested in today, I may not be
interested in tomorrow. Thus, we arrive at the second-generation email
concept where the user is able to express their own preferences on type
of content, frequency of delivery and depth of detail. This happens not
only at sign-up, but every email sent offers the option for the
recipient to rate the content and relevance and update their own
preferences in the sending engine to ensure future correspondence is
closely matched.

Email marketing should be about gathering insight and intelligence on
your customers, consumers and prospects and then using that insight to
better serve messages and offers. Second-generation email sending
platforms now offer deep integration into CRM solutions which, when
implemented correctly, would be the logical storage area of customer
preferences. Where CRM is not present, the email marketing platform must
come equipped with its own e-preferences engine that the recipient can
interact with.

Too much emphasis is placed on the benefits of email marketing for the
sender; the focus now needs to shift to the recipient. As recipients, we
all hunger for information on subjects we like and products we want to
buy. As marketers, we have a duty to allow the recipient to select what
they like and rate how we are doing it, then use this feedback to make
it better.

- The Revolution Email Marketing Report sponsored by Communigator.