Josue Sierra

I-Media Connection has a valuable article on what an organization can do to build an email list from scratch. You don’t have to be a web-marketing guru to execute on these ideas. If you have a website, you should be doing this already.

You can pretty much summarize it into 3 basic steps:

• It’s best to focus on organic growth
• Don’t require so much info that it keeps people from filling out the form
• If you must, choose a reputable list-rental service

This is rather simple and very basic, but so many organizations don’t take the time to execute on these baby steps.

The good news is that there are several ways to grow your lists organically that will enable you to amass a loyal following of happy customers. The first thing you want to do is put a sign-up link on every page of your website — and don’t hide it with small text or bury it at the bottom of your page. Put it in a prominent position that won’t get ignored. As you drive people to your website through various marketing and advertising programs, there should be an obvious path that leads respondents to a simple form for opting into your list. Making it easy to sign up is key, and that involves careful consideration about the number of steps that you require and the amount of information you request.

Looks like the current recession is helping push email into full maturity as a full fledged, reliable and valuable direct marketing channel.  Email has been proven to help increase brand loyalty and retention, and increase the value of a customer over the long term. That, of course, is on top of its cost effectiveness  and its traceability (when executed correctly). AdAge reports on this story.

“The economy has energized this channel,” said Ryan Deutsch, VP-strategic services and market development at StrongMail. “It’s become the rock star of direct marketing in a lot of these retail organizations because it’s the most cost-effective and most trackable.”

Thanks to its cost-effectiveness and retailers’ recession-era emphasis on retention — Shop.org says that the number of companies focused on retention has nearly doubled in the past year — experts say few cuts are being made to e-mail budgets, while areas including paid search, affiliate marketing and social marketing are coming under scrutiny.

And I thought being an email marketer made me “sexier”…but I guess not.

“It’s not sexy, but it delivers results, and it’s focusing on existing customers,” said Scott Silverman, executive director of Shop.org. “E-mail technology continues to advance and allows retailers to be smarter. It’s not about sending more e-mail; it’s about more-targeted and more-relevant e-mail.”

I’m glad to see someone is saying, “It’s not about sending more e-mail…”. I hope more marketers get that message, “…it’s about more-targeted and more-relevant e-mail.”

It’s all about the results.

Morgan Steward wrote some great thoughts in today’s Email Insider e-newsletter. The basic thought is that our peers don’t understand the value of what we do. He gives several reasons why, but one in particular resonated with my own personal experience.

Email lives at the center of a conflict between things that are urgent and things that are important. In a recent interview, I asked an email manager at a Fortune 500 retailer, “How often are you asked to execute something in email that you believe is detrimental to the long-term success of the program?” The answer: “Probably three or four times a week!” As ambassadors for the channel, we need to help our peers understand that email’s strength lies in its ability to deliver highly targeted messages to subscribers and to increase lifetime value — creating the link, creating trust, between buyer and seller. Though email can be delivered quickly and have an immediate impact, that does not mean speed of execution is email’s core strength.

In fact, speed and urgency run counter to email’s core strength. Building lifetime value takes time, planning, and thoughtful consideration. There is nothing urgent or last minute about it. “Lifetime” implies patience and meaningfulness. We need to constantly remind our peers that email only thrives when important messages are prioritized over urgent messages.

Email will only truly shine when marketers start looking at long-term strategic value of customers and how email plays a key role in building engagement. Traditional marketing professionals need to stop looking at email as the “quick & easy” way to communication with consumers.

Lack of marketing strategy and execution integration seems to be a common challenge to many companies face when there are “silos” within the marketing channels. Inevitably, your customers will end up seeing different creative, different offers, and different price points.

Your integration efforts would probably needs to start at your “List” level. For best integration, you’ll want to make sure all channels are working of a shared List/customer database. Depending on who your customer is, you would then build an integrated segmentation strategy (who gets what channel as well as what offer/incentive, etc.). You will also want to make sure to pay attention to touch points and marketing calendar — you don’t want customers getting a flood of communication from different channels, so keep things on the same marketing calendar and decide how much is appropriate for each segment/channel.

To determine the best strategy, you could run some tests — select a control group and then do some split or A/B testing (DM vs Email, or DM & Email, etc.).

Most experts agree that the evidence supports sending mail first and following with email a week after a timed in-home mail date. You can find some case studies with more information on this at the DMA (Direct Marketing Assocation) website: www.the-dma.org.

I would certainly advice on a cohesive messaging and offer value. We tend to do DM first (strong branding effect, as its in-hand and tangible) followed by a reminder email that reinforces the offer (one week later). I have also seen it to be effective to send “reminder” emails on regular intervals during the promotion period (this will depend on how long your promotion is to last).

Finally, all channels are usually tied to a custom-built micro site that pulls the promo together. Usually, the micro site should be created to match your corporate or product brand. I also like to use tracking links and unique URLs on DM vs Email to be able to measure which creative caused the customer to take action or respond, as well as to test various email creative.