Christmas Came Early

By Jason Stewart  - September 26, 2007

I was out of the office for 4 out of 5 days last week, but came back to discover something wonderful in my mailbox. The BtoB Magazine 2007 E-Mail Marketer Insight Guide.

I’m not going to recap the whole guide for you, of course. You can go read it for yourself, either as a PDF download or by individual article. I did particularly like the “10 Things to Avoid in B-to-B e-Newsletters” and the pieces on deliverability and bounce management. Other topics include strategy, analytics, list management, general best practices and more.

Ellis Booker mentioned something worth thinking about in his editor’s note. He says “…while improved filters have helped clear my inbox of unexpected, unnecessary, unwelcome spam, I now confront a thornier problem: picking among the dozens of targeted and relevant messages I receive every day.”

Really?

This made me take a closer look at my inbox. I just started here at Demandbase in June, and I think it takes a good 9-12 months with a new email address before you get fully immersed and exposed to the email marketing hurricane. So I’m not there yet. I just went to a big event, signed up for another one, and have subscribed to a few publications so it should hit full speed soon. But all in all, even looking back to my last job, I think he might be right. I do get less spam and more stuff I actually read. Wow. So the big question is….why?

Is it the filters? Are the can-spam regulations working? Booker suggests that improved analytics and integration with CRM systems have helped email marketers to do their jobs better and more effectively. “Targeted Marketing,” after all, has become a popular phrase in the space. This could be all be true. Or maybe I’m just lucky.

That being said, there is still plenty of room for improvement. For example, Booker also suggests that so much time and effort has been spent on improved deliverability and the content of the messages themselves that some very obvious things are slipping through the cracks. For example, where do you send people after you get the coveted “click-through?” Is it connected to the email you just sent, or are you simply dumping people on to your home page to bounce away when they don’t see what they expect. People have learned about the importance and relevance of landing pages for the Google ads, but have not yet applied the same logic to their email campaigns or direct mail pieces.

One interesting point that is touched on in the magazine, but really hit home for me personally was a content question. Demandbase recently spent a fair amount of time and effort on an email template that looks fantastic when the images are enabled in Outlook, and still good (and readable) when the images are not enabled. I sent a test, and it looked great. Then I saw the email on my new phone, as I recently took the plunge and got a BlackBerry. It was bad. The amount of scrolling required before I got past the headers and links and URLs was painful. I was committed to reading this thing, and I still got bored and almost deleted the sucker.

I had seen articles dedicated to this in Marketing Sherpa, and (of course) knew it made sense, but until I actually saw it on my own device, it never really hit home with me. Combine this with the number of people I saw at a few various events last week who were working on their smart phones, and I will never run a campaign without first testing how it looks on my BlackBerry. Lesson learned.