Don’t Shoot Your Email Newsletter

Lately I keep hearing that email marketing is dying, drowning in a sea of spam and unable to keep up with its younger brother RSS. My inbox doesn’t show it—I bet yours doesn’t either.

One person backed this with an article by Chris Pirillo that claimed email was already dead—killed by RSS and blogs. The problem isn’t email as a medium, it’s the way most email marketers use it.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a bona fide Bloglines addict. RSS is here to stay and is a critical part of any online marketer’s toolkit. But the reports of email’s death as a marketing communications vehicle are very premature. Unfortunately most companies see email as a standard “batch and blast” vehicle and only measure clicks and opens. They’re underutilizing email as one of the only true one-to-one communication vehicles. Since each email is sent individually, the content can (and should) be tailored to that individual, and the response is measured on an individual basis in a way that RSS can’t. This sort of personalization requires customer data.

A recent Jupitermedia study showed that one third of email marketers cite “lack of customer data” as one of their greatest challenges. Your customers express their individual preferences every time they open and read your newsletter…and when they don’t open it. It produces a mountain of data and there’s gold in them-thar hills.

• Are your new subscribers as active as your old ones?
• Which sources produce the most active subscribers and best prospects?
• What information do buyers prefer? Is it the same as prospects?
• Who in your company writes content that is most popular with your customers?
• Which elements of your newsletter design drive traffic?

Your email newsletter knows the answer to these questions and more. And you should too.

The vast majority of email marketers I’ve encountered fall into the trap of treating their email newsletters as a “checkbox” item. The dreadful down-to-the-wire, scramble-for-content-and-blast-to-the-list-before-the-deadline task. If this sounds all too familiar, you’re probably not truly extracting the value hidden in your email response data. Your email readers are telling you about themselves and your market. Just listen.