Mitchel Ahern, the director of marketing communications for One to One Interactive, recently had his article 4 Disruptions Changing Email Marketing published on iMediaConnection. Stevens & Tate thought this would be an excellent article to share with our readers, especially those interested in email marketing strategy.

Email marketing has traditionally been the cornerstone of most brand relationship marketing strategies, and it continues to remain a key element. But changes are happening now that are disrupting the role of email with new challenges to overcome, and new platforms and technologies.

Permission-based marketing
Permission has always been crucial to email marketing; to send marketing email without permission is spamming. Even if the customer has formally given permission, if they feel like that permission isn’t being respected, they will treat the marketer’s messages like spam. Sophisticated marketers carefully manage and meet customer expectations of how their relationship with the brand will evolve.

The rise of social media has elevated the importance of marketing communication permissions management. Permission is an even more critical element of social media marketing, and proceeding blindly can have significant and public negative consequences.

Relevancy to the user: targeting by the brand
When brands provide customers with the messages and content they want and need, that material is relevant to the customer. By increasing message relevancy, marketers build engagement with their customers. Customers value relevant communications and that value builds ongoing attention to the marketer’s messages and builds trust between the brand and their audience.

The flip side of relevancy is that unwanted and irrelevant messages are at best ignored and at worst identified as spam, damaging the marketer’s overall reputation. Therefore it is imperative that brands engage in an ongoing process to discover what it is their customers want, and then produce that content and deliver it at the best time, in the desired channel.

Communication proximity in time and space
The history of communication over the last hundred or so years is a tale of increasing speed and convenience. From the telegraph in the office to the phone in the home, in the car, in the pocket, and in the ear, we have become accustomed to having the communication we want, at the time we want it, and in the place we want it. Marketers also want to have their message delivered to the right person at the right time in the right place.

Customers will grant permission to brands to communicate with them in their desired channels as long as the message is relevant and timely. New technologies not only enable customers to have multiple platforms of content proximity such as the desktop, smartphone, tablet, in-car, digital television, and digital out-of-home, but they can target messages based on the geographic location of where those platforms are being consumed.

Each these technologies have their own unique parameters that marketers will need to manage in order to maintain the relevance of communications with their customers. Managing all of these parameters can be a significant marketing management challenge.

Four email disruptions: identity, permissions, publishing, and measurement
This is an era of disruption for the marketing industry, which means there are both challenges and opportunities facing all of us as marketers. For email marketing, there are four significant disruptions to be discussed in this article:

• Identity fragmentation
• Customer permission expectations
• Publishing complexity
• Measurement complexity

Disruption 1: Identity fragmentation
In the earliest days of direct marketing identity was a name and a postal address. An entire industry evolved around the management of those names and addresses and the provision of additional parameters to improve the relevance of the message to the consumer. At the dawn of digital marketing, the email address became an equivalent key marker of identity. As the costs of physical mail have skyrocketed, email has become an increasingly critical part of a brand’s marketing mix.

Unfortunately, as the importance of email has increased, the dependability of the email address as a unique identifier has decreased. Most critically, the email industry recognizes that the annual churn of email addresses has reached thirty percent. Consumers aren’t going offline, or leaving email, but the email addresses they are leaving are increasingly transitory.

This is due in part to fast-moving employment, school, and service provider changes, and in part to the use of transitory email addresses for brand email relationships. However, it is also clear that the decline of email as a prime online identity signifier is covalent with the rise of “walled garden” social media environments, particularly Facebook, but also Twitter, LinkedIn, Classmates, and many other services. With more than 500 hundred million active users, Facebook has become an address and a messaging environment, and many consumers actively maintain profiles in multiple channels.

For brands, this complex and shifting customer identity management environment poses new challenges, but it also holds new opportunities. If consumers can be engaged deeply within their social spaces, then deeper brand relationships can be forged.

Disruption 2: Customer permission expectations
Debate and subsequent legislation concerning spam email made consumers increasingly aware of the nature of the email marketing communications they were receiving, and significantly raised their expectations over the amount of control they were entitled to have over those messages. Increasingly, powerful consumer email clients gave customers more control over their marketing messages; hitting the “spam” button not only stopped the offending email, it did direct damage to the email sender (possibly more damage than the customer realized).

Now consumers are even more savvy about the value of the marketing communications they participate in; indeed they look upon these communications reciprocally. In an era of smartphone apps, the value of positive or negative ratings and comments in venues like Yelp or GetGlue are clear to both the brand, the consumer, and the ratings platform itself. What used to be the hidden mechanics of direct marketing is now the very public business models of social media apps in which the consumer is asked to knowingly participate.

This means that marketers must enable customers to manage their own brand communications, particularly as to the topic, frequency, and channels on which they receive brand messages — otherwise they run the risk losing the right to message to their customer. On the other hand, brands that successfully offer their customers the level of messaging control they’ve come to expect can reap the rewards of having a truly successful one-to-one relationship.

Disruption 3: Publishing to a complex multi-channel environment
It was so much simpler at the dawn of the digital age; in fact, digital communications were going to make it easier and less expensive to stay in touch with each other via email rather than fussy and awkward postal mail. The web was going to put key information at your fingertips — no need to get out the yellow pages or encyclopedia. And indeed this came to pass, but now the explosion in messaging channels and platforms has added new complexity for consumers, and new costs for marketers.

Simple email messaging has metastasized into multiple messaging channels such as instant messaging, chat, SMS, Twitter, and social media messaging, just to name the most popular. New forms of messaging have arisen: ratings, commentary, shout-outs, and viral pass-alongs that spread opinions anonymously or semi-anonymously. Digital content, once found on a relatively static web page from a links list or a search engine, has now become unanchored and disaggregated from its source and spreads through the digisphere via XML/RSS to be consumed in many different readers.

Indeed digital devices have multiplied and mutated to such an extent that their original functions are being eclipsed. Mobile phone usage is at an all-time high, while paradoxically mobile voice conversations are declining as consumers use apps, news readers, and SMS to send and receive messages from their friends, families, and trusted brands. New and hybrid devices such as tablets, digital media players, and smart pens blur the distinctions between hardware categories.

Disruption 4: Measurement complexity
As with all direct marketing, measurement is still the key to success, and measurement has never been easier. Nearly every digital interaction leaves a trace, and digital consumers can be coaxed to provide even more information. And that is the challenge: How can marketers use large volumes of disparate information to make smart choices about deploying limited resources among nearly unlimited digital messaging and content channels? Measurement is made even more complex as messages and content are sent, forwarded, received, and re-forwarded across multiple digital channels.

Marketers need to distill the large volume of widely diverse cross-channel measurements to describe campaign ROI and subscriber value normalized across those channels, as the measurement of content interactions is far more complex than standard email metrics. Each channel also needs to be analyzed by its specific parameters in order to maximize customer engagement for each channel.

Conclusion
It is not possible now, and it may never again be possible, for a brand to pick a strategy and a vendor and then let its messaging system run itself. Engaging with your customers on a one-to-one basis requires ongoing effort to manage the mechanics, the messages, and the relationships with customers. Getting the right message to the right recipient at the right time and on the right channel keeps getting more complicated, while at the same time marketers are under pressure to prove the effectiveness of their messaging and content publishing initiatives.

Email and other messaging vendors are now offering improved tools to help their clients manage customer relationships; and marketers now understand the importance of achieving deeper engagement with their customers. Having a comprehensive universal messaging strategy in place will help brands communicate their essence to their customers in a fun, engaging, and authentic manner.

To read this article in its entirety, click here.

Related Posts:

• E-Mail Marketing As A Tool
• E-Mail Marketing: Why You Should Always Use A Double Opt-in
• The CAN-SPAM Act
• 5 Opt-In Methods
• How To Write an Autoresponder Message That Gets Results

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