Four Great E-Mail Observations From DMNews

DMNews sent out their Essential Guide to E-Mail Marketing last week. There are many good nuggets in this sixty-two page publication. I pulled four interesting observations for you to see.

David Daniels at Jupiter says "The majority of email marketers are tethered to the production process of getting their weekly mailings out and often do not have the time or the resources to think strategically about how to improve their mailings". This is a great observation. Changing the internal working processes can be much harder than adopting new technology.

Chris Baggott, co-founder of ExactTarget, says "Planning and creativity are required to collect and compile actionable data. Armed with a handful of well-maintained subscriber attributes, audiences can be identified and segmented, which provides creative teams with the information they need to develop appropriately targeted messages." Technology and information are accessible to creative teams. Database Marketers have a responsiblity for communicating better with creative teams. The improvement in results is likely to be better than what is observed when a geeky algorithm is implemented.

John Murphy at Rubin Response Services Inc. says "The subject line should compel the recipient to take action. The subject line is no place for branding, product announcements or listing the product benefits." The subject line represents high-priced real estate. If the objective is to sell something, use that real estate wisely.

Finally, Alan Rimm-Kaufman says "Don't evaluate your e-mail program in isolation. Taking e-mail results out of context can lead to bad decisions. For example, one national retailer adopted a strict last-marketing-contact-gets-credit-for-the-order allocation rule." I can't tell you how often I hear about this methodology. The methodology is clearly better than doing nothing. But the results obtained by using the methodology can lead to trouble.

You can download the sixty-two page document as a PDF file by clicking here.