E-mail Is So Pushy

Jeanniey Mullen | October 1, 2007 | 0 comments

Not to sound like the guy from the tractor-pull commercials, but last week sounded like this: "E-mail! E-mail! E-MAIL! Don't miss E-MAIL!" It was everywhere I turned:

At OMMA, I spoke on two e-mail panels, and members of my team and colleagues spoke on four others. Then I walked the floor and spent quality time with lots of e-mail vendors, like eRoi, Puresend, Conversen, and ExactTarget, discussing the future of e-mail marketing technology companies and where the real opportunities lie.

At MIXX, it was conversation after conversation about e-mail.

At work, it was all e-mail planning, all the time.

At home, it was e-mail from almost every family member and friend I know.

On Facebook, it was invites from Anne Holland for the MarketingSherpa Group.

In the blogosphere, it was a tremendous week of insights from Mark Brownlow.

In the community space, the Email Experience Council released its follow-up "Retail Email Welcome Study."

Even in the print/online world, eMarketer release a fantastic, but extremely conservative, report that looks at the size of the e-mail marketing industry.

Don't get me wrong. Anyone who knows me knows I pretty much live in the e-mail world, so exposure to all this wasn't new. But the volume of content in one week did get me thinking about why and how e-mail works best in a marketing environment.

We know 97 percent of marketers use e-mail, and we know people now rely as much on e-mail to manage their lives as they once relied on diaries and planners. But at what point in the sales cycle does e-mail have the biggest impact?

When you think about a customer's buying cycle, it typically starts with awareness of a need or problem, moves to consideration, then evaluation, and finally purchase. After that, a whole new experiential cycle begins as a customer tries a product, responds to the products performance, shares experiences, then determines the future relationship with the product/brand or company.

E-mail clearly plays a role at every phase of both cycles but, considering the impact of other digital media influencers and offline advertising and marketing, I've concluded e-mail's most valuable role is being pushy.

Many technology firms and tactical e-mail producers will show you phenomenal results of e-mail's impact at each phase of both cycles. E-mail continuously generates superior (or at least extremely competitive) response rates when compared with any other channel. Yet with longer-term analysis, e-mail's strongest impact proves to be its ability to speed up the sales process and facilitate the positive experience sharing/repurchase efforts in the experience cycle.

How pushy is your e-mail? Conduct these two quick reports to check your campaign's effectiveness:

Benchmark consumers' non-e-mail sales cycle and compare it with the sales cycle of those who opted in to e-mail programs. If you don't find a 20 percent reduction in sales cycle time for the opt-in e-mail file, you need to improve your e-mail strategy.

Build a 12-month trend report on "send to a friend/colleague" clicks. If in the first three months of e-mail messages after a purchase is made, you don't see at least a 1 percent pass-along rate, consider surveying your customer base. You may have a product satisfaction issue.

Thank goodness e-mail is pushy! Because of that, our marketing efforts just continue to get better.

Meet Jeanniey at ClickZ Specifics: E-Mail Marketing on October 2, in New York City.

Want more e-mail marketing information? ClickZ E-Mail Reference is an archive of all our e-mail columns, organized by topic.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeanniey Mullen is global executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Zinio, the world's foremost digital publishing products and services company, and home of the largest newsstand. She holds the same roles concurrently for VIVmag, the world's first exclusively digital luxury women's magazine. Renowned as a pioneer in e-mail marketing — the nascent stage of the digital marketing revolution — Mullen has employed her penchant for building active and engaged communities by architecting processes and systems for delivering exceptional customer service and relevant content across multiple media. She is widely credited for her pivotal role in ushering in a new era of digital marketing communications.

Founder and current executive director of the Email Experience Council, Jeanniey has broadened her reach to master the social, mobile, and digital publishing and advertising industries. Today, she brings this extensive experience to bear in her role as the public face of Zinio and VIVmag, defining and implementing strategies to build partnerships with publishers, brands, and consumers. These initiatives command monumental growth for both companies. She is an accomplished author with two books to her credit, as well as a regular columnist for ClickZ. Mullen is a frequent and highly sought-after speaker at digital marketing, e-tail, and publishing events around the world.