2006 New Year's Resolution: Stop Using Email to Send Your Message to Customers

In a great article titled, "Why Marketers should stop relying entirely on house list email in 2006" by Anne Holland, President of Marketing Sherpa, she points out that companies should not rely on email marketing communication as the sole point of contact with existing customers.

Wow - that is a bold statement in this world of electronic marketing where it's as easy to deliver a single message to one customer or thousands of customers at such an economical price. Well, that's the point. If it is just as easy for your competitor to send email to the same group of customers, mixed in between some annoying spam and phishing schemes, spiced with black lists and gray lists - whaalaa - what do you think will happen to your message? Your ROI on email will continually shrink and shrink while you spend more money on the same lists of prospects that your competitor is using.

Ms. Holland points out:

"...only 10%-15% of sales leads generated in a b-to-b marketing department are truly 'sales ready' at the moment the leads come in. Another 15%-20% are completely unqualified... What happens to the rest of the leads in the gray area?" She points out that the gray area leads will be customers "some day" and that sales teams are focused on current quarter business and not on "lead-nurturing" for future "some day" business. "Lead nurturing" has become the role of marketing, but is low on the priority list, since it has future payoff.

How to change this trend?

"If you can show you've increased house lead ROI, and incidentally prove that more marketing touches during the sales cycle assisted in closing more sales, marketing becomes the hero again instead of a cost center". She goes on to explain that a key metric to watch for will be "lead ROI" and not "cost per lead".

She points out that reliance on email as a vehicle to maximizing "lead ROI" has inherent flaws, such as:

1) Email delivery issues

2) Email might not be the channel your customer wants to use

3) Email is virtual and does not engage all your senses

In my opinion, email is not interactive and that is the problem when you want your customers to experience the live and active face of your business. Interactive communication presumes timeliness in an exchange of ideas such as a conversation with a person in a store, a phone call checking on the last order delivery time, or live online chat welcoming a customer back to the website. Email is a one way communication or delayed conversation at best, so there is too much reliance on the literal interpretation of the written word without a chance to clarify, understand and agree on the context surrounding the conversation.

I suggest that the best way to make a house list of customers your best source of new business is by adopting more interactive channels of communication, so more senses are involved and a "brand experience" has a human touch to it. A few ideas are

1) Proactive phone reminders
2) Proactive chat
3) Invitations to interact via regular mail
4) Trade shows or customer summits

These are all interactive mediums that have great success. Yes, there is a cost for doing these that is higher than email campaings, but appealing to the senses of your most loyal customers will ensure further loyalty and larger orders.