Oh The Irony

I received this email today from a PR agency. The email was about how PR and marketing communications need to change away from their traditional channels and embrace new channels like social networks. The email had no links above the fold and read very much like a blog post.

2009 Annual National Client Email Marketing Report

Denise Cox did such a good job describing this that I thought I would copy her text (below) or you can go to see the original post.

"I love email marketing stats, in particular european and/or UK specific stats - which can be pretty thin on the ground. If you are a UK marketer, please consider participating in the 2009 Annual National Client Email Marketing Report so the results will reflect one of the most up to date resources for UK email marketing research. (Survey link)

About: The National Client Email Marketing Survey is an initiative undertaken by the DMA UK’s Email Marketing Council. It’s designed to complement the National Email Benchmarking Report, which surveys the Email Service Providers (ESPs). The Client Email Marketing Survey asks client marketers to provide their answers to a mixture of response rate data, as well as attitudinal questions. The reports are produced on a quarterly basis. (Executive brief for 2006, Access to all past reports - free for members, fee for non-members.)

Survey guidelines: Where a % is asked for, please enter numeric values only. If you do not know the answer, please leave blank.

Taking the Survey: Participants will receive a complimentary copy of the survey results; insert your email address in the first box to receive the report when it is issued. (Survey link) Survey closes 29 January."

Ready Steady Email Date Announced

It has just been confirmed that Ready Steady Email will be running at TFM&A. This is a highly interactive half day session where participants work in teams to develop an email marketing strategy for an on-line t-shirt retailer. I encourage everybody to sign up.

What is DM?

Entire, an agency here in the UK has noticed the blurring of the lines in DM and feels it is time "to establish a fresh, new definition of DM in the digital age ... by inviting those who know the industry intimately - the people who create, craft, strive and succeed for their clients - to explain what DM means to them."

The definition they are proposing is:

"Direct Marketing. Think of it as advertising that targets an identified audience with a specific proposition. This, in turn, harnesses the power of the brand, and product or service. What really sets it apart is the call to action which allows the effectiveness of every communication to be accurately measured, even in multi-channel campaigns. This makes it an ideal vehicle both for customer acquisition and retention, through online and offline channels."

In general I think this is pretty good but I have a few thoughts that may make it better.

• Instead of telling people how to think about DM, let's tell them what it is.
• The phrase "identified audience" is too general. All marketing is aimed at an identified audience. DM is targeted at an identifiable audience. In other words, it is marketing material that is targeted at a specific individual. This individual could be anonymous like when re-targeting a banner ad but because we are targeting based on a cookie we are targeting a specific individual.
• This may be a good opportunity to build some rigour into what a DM call to action must include. A place to start would be to say that a DM call to action is SMART (specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and timed)
  

I am really looking forward to seeing how this project evolves and to see what definition emerges.

Congratulations dotMailer

Congratulations to dotMailer for winning the Croydon Business Best of Burough Award for Best Growing Business. also a big thanks to the team for having me along. Clearly they are rapturous over their win - well Tink is anyway.

Is Spam Really a Big Problem?

Here is an article on netimperative about some interesting research sponsored by moneysupermarket.com. The key take aways for me are:

• The average consumer only receives just over 10 spam messages per day - for some reason this seems low.
• 90% of consumers do not take active steps to stop spam. I cannot decide if this is good for legitimate marketers or not. On the one hand this increases clutter in the inbox but this also means that we do not have to worry about our opted-in readers accidentally creating false positives. I would be interested to hear your thoughs on this.
• Spam still works - 14% of respondents admitted to having clicked on a spam.

One of my concerns however is how they defined spam. As we all know there is the legal definition and the consumer's definition. Consumers think any message that is not relevant is spam. So this begs the question, "how many of the 10 spam messages per day are legitimate emails that the respondents opted-in to receive?"

More Time of Day Stuff

Apparently, when we send emails is the most important issue in the industry this week. Check out this from MarketingSherpa.

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30917&pop=no