There is no doubt about it – companies love the mass email marketing strategy.

But with inboxes fuller than ever and attention spans reducing at a rapid rate, how are you going to adapt your email strategy?

This article aims to get you thinking about how to re-engineer your email strategy and metrics to give your email marketing a new lease of life.

Rethinking performance metrics

Marketers are obsessed with campaign based metrics – opens / clicks and most of all revenue but what was the value lost from your recent email campaign?

ROI from email marketing is obviously the reason why so many businesses adopt the mass mail strategy, but what impact does this have on your subscriber base?

Email addresses did not magically appear on your database, building a relationship and trust with customers is a difficult process and a costly one – so preservation of an organisations most valuable asset (its database) is integral. Mass email marketing is more costly than organisations give it credit for – thus it is important to calculate the cost of database churn – particularly if it is those that have made several purchases and are of high value to your organisation.

Rethinking your content strategy

Untargeted promotional emails sent to the masses may capture a few prospect buyers by chance, but outside of this if your consumers are not in the decision set for purchasing your product your email has fallen on deaf ears.

According to a report by Exact Target in the US, marketers are looking to integrate social media into their email campaigns. So whether this be providing subscribers with the opportunity to share content or driving users to fan pages this will be one of the trends to emerge in the next 6 – 12 months in Australia.

However these techniques are ineffective if your content strategy is unengaging. Applying some of the principles of social media – such as delivering value through quality content rather than pushing marketing messages to consumers will be the platform of any successful integration between the techniques.

Rethinking email intelligence

Email marketing has become such a quantitative science. Integrating email systems with analytics to discover end to end behaviour and to improve campaigns has been such a valuable source of intelligence BUT what can email learn from website development? There is so much value gained from the end consumer that email marketers are really only getting half the story. It may sound simple but build feedback mechanisms into your campaigns to give customers an open invitation to respond with content suggestions and requests and most importantly feedback on why people are unsubscribing.

Rethinking emails importance

With so many other new digital channels gaining the attention at present, email marketing is the unloved child. Your email strategy probably has and will continue to play an important role in achieving your marketing objectives so it’s probably time to rethink how you can take your email marketing to the next level.

Have you recently changed your email strategy for the better? If so why not share your tips here.

© Digital Marketing Lab Blog

In recent months Australians true love of social media has been revealed. In March 2009 Nielson released their latest Australian online research which demonstrated 6.5 million Australians now belong to at least 1 social network.

However perhaps the most interesting finding was that Australians usage of social networking sites has now outstripped email marketing. In particular it is the younger demographics who are shunning email for a more personalised, instantaneous and interactive communication experience.

Email Marketing - The Issues in Detail;
Mismatch Between Push & Pull of Email Marketing
With the economic downturn driving down budgets, marketers are doing more with email given its low cost. This is creating a widening gap as consumers are using email less but businesses are driving more. Net result - lower response rates and increasing user disengagement.

Why Log In?
Traditionally email was a great way to keep in touch with our friends and family – however there is no shortage of sites providing a rich interactive experience to do this. These new channels are resulting in increased separation between personal and professional communication tools. As a result in private time users will spend more time dipping in and out of their inboxes (like a letterbox) to quickly retrieve information of importance rather than spending lengthy amounts of time staying in touch with their loved ones.

ESPs Are Evolving
Faced by decreasing relevance, ESPs such as Yahoo understand the shift in social behaviour and are re-inventing the inbox. Yahoo is doing this is by providing the new smarter inbox function enabling filtering emails into a priority inbox from regular contacts with whom the user exchanges mail with. Yahoo is also integrating updates from connections to provide a more interactive tool.

Rivals Hotmail have also created network functionality to integrate with properties across their Windows Live portfolio.

But is this change too little, too late for ESPs? Do we need another network to interact with our friends – or will the latest changes by ESPs be the demise of social networks?

What does this mean for email marketing?
Despite the changing landscape, email still has a good shelf-life for marketers, but marketers must evolve. How?

Timing is key - As email user behaviour in and out of work hours will now differ significantly – it is now more important than ever to measure the most effective time to be sending email.

What Engagement – Organisations must extend their email program to be a more interactive as opposed to traditional one way dialogue. This could be through encouraging end users to contribute new ideas, feedback or even be involved in content generation for distribution which is more inline with the participative web. In addition and where relevant organisations should look to integrate email with social media and use new features such as video email to differentiate

Control & Preferences – Now more than ever marketers need to give people more control over when and how they consume email content, making the end user more likely to consume email communication.

Do you have any other thoughts or ideas for email marketers to evolve? If so comment below;