IQ News: Analysis - Nailing the Bullseye

Opt-in: Better marketing through direct e-mail. Since the birth of direct marketing, the mantra for companies hawking their wares has been to establish one-to-one relationships with consumers, a daunting task in a mass market world. It wasn't until the Internet came along that companies could effectively aim their messages at their desired targets and hope for anything that resembled a direct hit. With the advent of electronic mail-perhaps the digital age's ultimate killer app-e-marketers can now execute the most direct of direct marketing campaigns and nail the bullseye every time. At least, that's the spin of scores of new companies hoping to make direct marketing e-mail as effective a killer app for advertising and selling as it has been for the growth of online communication. Right now, their optimism knows no bounds. "E-mail marketing is an incredible marketing tool," says Rosalind Resnick, president of NetCreations, a New York-based pioneer in direct e-mail marketing. "It's better, faster and cheaper than traditional direct mail." To be sure, launching an e-mail marketing campaign has just the benefits Resnick speaks of: high-speed delivery, low costs to vendors and, most importantly, the potential for attractive double digit response rates. But the road these e-mail marketers are walking down is paved with at least as much junk as gold. Anyone with an e-mail address has been intruded upon by the pernicious junk e-mail deluge known as spam. These unsolicited e-mails offer everything from get-rich-quick schemes to links to hardcore porn sites and have become a tiresome and almost entirely unwanted presence in consumers' collective in-boxes. Thus, this black sheep of the e-mail family may have done much to cause consumers to tune out marketers' potentially attractive offers. But the interest in e-mail marketing by major advertisers indicates that they should be concerned with giving the niche an image makeover. According to a report from Cambridge, Mass.-based Forrester Research, 70 percent of companies cited e-mail as "important" or "very important" to their sales and marketing strategies, while only 6 percent said e-mail was "very unimportant." The companies that are trying to meet the demand for e-mail campaigns include NetCreations, yesmail.com and MarketHome, which offer companies back-end surveying, tracking and e-mail serving to consumers. All are working to overcome the spam-ish stigma associated with mass e-mailing by focusing their attention on inviting consumers to participate, or opt-in, in viewing advertising. "There's really a spectrum when it comes to e-mail marketing," says Anthony Priore, vice president of marketing at yesmail.com (formerly WebPromote), the Vernon Hills, Ill.-based direct e-mail marketing network. "There's spam on one end and then there's the opt-in model on the other." However, the persistence of spammers threatens to thwart legitimate e-marketing schemes, since there remains a public perception that commercial e-mail and spam are one and the same. "That perception is both a problem and an opportunity," says Jeff Wilkins, senior vice president at New York-based 24/7 Media, which recently acquired e-mail marketing group Sift. "Clearly, all responsible marketers use opt-in-only e-mail lists. Anyone can buy a CD-ROM with 50 million e-mail addresses for 50 bucks, but they're being overcharged at that price. If you don't have the permission to contact the folks, it's bad business, it's not effective and it's going to give you a backlash and a blackeye." And, further irony for spammers is that "spam is terribly inefficient," says Randy Delucchi, a director of customer service at MSN Hotmail, who was recently appointed to the board of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail, a watchdog group that advocates anti-spam legislation. "[It] requires thousands, or millions of deliveries in order to find enough rubes to bite." E-marketers are working to separate themselves from the spammers by alerting consumers to the fact that not only can they opt-in, but they can also opt-out of receiving e-mail solicitations; they often sprinkle prominent opportunities for consumers to unsubscribe throughout the body text of their e-mails. The consumers' ability to control what they want and don't want is key to effective permission marketing, according to Seth Godin, vice president of direct marketing at Yahoo! and the man who literally wrote the book on the subject, the recently-released Simon & Schuster tome Permission Marketing. Godin believes that traditional marketing strategies have failed to effectively get messages to consumers, and that consumers will eventually come to value opt-in e-mail more than they do traditional advertising communication. The "interruption marketing" schemes of the past simply can't cut through the clutter of today's highly competitive marketplace. "Interruption marketers reach people [while they are] doing something else," explains Godin, who says in his book that society's diminished free time is a major obstacle for companies wanting to grab consumers' attention. "You have to accept the ads to get the free media. Permission marketers, on the other hand, are delivering ads that are the media." And that, says Godin, is the beginning of a dialog between vendor and consumer that can lead to customer loyalty. Godin isn't alone among the optimists who feel that opt-in e-mail will eventually be seen as a boon to consumers. "The roots are there," says Jim Williams, president of Berkeley, Calif.-based e-mail marketer MarketHome. "The more that the industry promotes [opt-in e-mail], the more comfortable end users will become." Through a variety of methods, including brand recognition and value-adds from the advertiser, many believe that consumers will come to know the difference between good and bad e-mail solicitations. "I think mainstream, well-known retailers have a good relationship with those people who have opted-in and it's immediately recognizable, so if you get an e-mail from them, you know it's different from spam," says Williams. He claims MarketHome customers have seen response rates as high as 40 percent on invites and the same percentage for future offers back to the main list. Compared to banners, which average click-through rates in the low single digits, targeted e-mail marketing strategies may be the only way to go for companies who want to reach their audience effectively online. Admittedly, though, there's no magic bullet and opt-in e-mail marketing, like any other marketing scheme, is by no means perfect. "It's not perfect, it's not flame free," admits Resnick. "Anytime you send out e-mail, you're going to get flamed by somebody. But I think this is about as good as it's going to get." At least for now. ƒ

Brand Marketing

IQ News: Analysis - Nailing the Bullseye

Kipp Cheng

About

Subscriptions

Events

Publications

WORK SMARTER - LEARN, GROW AND BE INSPIRED.

Subscribe today!

Kipp Cheng