Bronto customers that pay quarterly are now faced with a cellphone-like contract where if your ‘email minutes’ are not used in that quarter, they expire like bad produce.

The ramifications are for customers to send more messages in order to not lose their email minutes. This is bad business.

As you point out, the only way to make email relevant is with a good marketing database, triggers and event detection, dialog marketing capabilities, and campaign management and automation tools. Those items describe the beginnings of a complete relationship marketing solution, of which email marketing is just a channel. Maybe it’s time for email providers to evolve into relationship marketing providers.

I would love to see more leadership from the EMSPs and other marketing technology vendors on this front. For example, most of the measurement reports provided by the vendors only offer campaign analysis not cross-campaign analysis or (dare I suggest it) customer analysis. Yet, the data is (or darn well should be) resident in their systems to support this analysis. By trending metrics like engagement with the email program over time, service providers could help their clients start to understand the impact (positive and negative) of email. Another opportunity for leadership is in the area of testing. It’s nice to see emailers leveraging tools like A/B testing and multivariate testing, but these testing tactics are still specific to a campaign. For many emarketers, the idea of control group holdouts to help understand the ROI is still a pretty foreign concept. And, again, few of the providers provide the functionality or imbedded methodology in their tools to help emarketers move forward.

Best,
Elana

Good point about the cheap price of blasting email that makes it more difficult to argue that a marketing database and targeting efforts should be applied. But aside from the cost of sending email, would you think that there is an opportunity cost to blasting unwelcome email? The loss of attention may follow. As soon as a recipient marks the sender as spam all future attempts to communicate land in the spam folder for this person.

I suppose that a marketer would only perceive this as an opportunity cost however if they believe in the scarcity of customers ( i.e. Peppers & Rogers point with their previous book). If the marketer however believes that there is an endless sea of opportunities, then the cost of losing any amount of opportunities would be seen as negligible.

And in Internet marketing, maybe marketers have been right to think that there have been many more customers to acquire (except at the big brands).

Thanks for the detailed insights.