I spent much of May and June on the road in eight cities with the Online Marketing Summit
(www.onlinemarketingsummit.com) Whistle Stop tour.   It was great to get out and meet with so many smart digital marketers.  

Here’s a few observations/trends:

1. Email rocks.  It’s still a very important part of the online marketing mix.  In fact, email this year has been elevated to a sort of celebrity status.  Lots of executive attention due to the low cost and high return.  It’s the biggest revenue driver in the toolkit. 

2. No amount of celebrity can trump the realities of lean budgets.  Marketing budgets do not seem to be growing, but the investment continues to be strong with email and search, where the immediate revenue and return is.    For email, there isn’t so much innovation as preservation: Preserving our jobs and our team, growing our database assets, tying the various eCRM elements together (even loosely) and maintaining our  list hygiene and deliverability budgets.    

3. Top challenges around email are still deliverability and breaking through the clutter (relevancy.)    Especially with tight budgets. Marketers need immediate return.

4. There is still a LOT of confusion between “delivered” as reported by most ESP systems (which is really your bounce rate) and inbox deliverability (which is if your message actually reaches the inbox and can earn a response).  This something that I blogged about last month (ADD LINK).  It is also that I’m working on with a group of industry volunteers through the DMA’s Email Experience Council.  We want to publish new definitions of these terms to eliminate confusion and ease benchmarking comparisons.  (Email me if you want to participate!  We’d love to have you.)

5. Data integration is finally starting to be possible, but too many marketers, even big brands, can’t do it efficiently.   The promise of truly end-to-end eCRM is very attractive.  But remains elusive for most.  A lesson for all of us in the vendor community – we just have to make this easier, more automated and tied to stronger analytics.

6. My session was about how complaint and deliverability data are essential parts of a good email marketing optimization effort.   You can’t make good decisions about your program if you don’t have access to inbox deliverability data.  Period.  Think about what happens when you see erratic or suddenly poor campaign results.  What do we do?  We blame the creative.  “Oh, that offer must have been terrible.” Or “Gee, subscribers must hate blue backgrounds.”  Actually, what is likely is that the messages never reached the inbox – they were blocked by the ISPs like Yahoo! or Gmail or Orange due to a weak sender reputation or an infrastructure glitch.  If you don’t have access to inbox deliverability data, ask us or your ESP for it.

If you would like a copy of the handout from my session, just email me at stephanie[dot]miller@returnpath[dot]net.

Comments

Stephanie,

Great article. I truly wonder how many ESPs are pushing towards total CRM capability. It'd be great to see the bigger companies go toward that model much more, and it may take a push strategy from the ESPs to do so.

Thanks, Scott. I agree - marketers have to demand stronger reporting and more aligned data integration - only then will vendors provide it. On the other hand, many marketers don't use the reporting that they have today, so you can see why vendors might not put this at the top of the product development queue.

Just wanted to add an author's note: Here is the link to the inbox deliverability vs. delivered article that I reference above.

Sorry about that missing link!

Stephanie

http://www.returnpath.net/blog/2009/06/delivered-may-not-mean-to-the.php