The Social Role of Email

By Stephanie Jordan
in

Email, according to Stephanie Miller, global markets catalyst for Return Path, Inc., was the first social media. “The promise of email was this one-to-one dialog and it was going to truly be an interactive experience that would allow consumers and marketers to speak to each other directly,” she says. “That was the promise of it. Email marketing as a philosophy for 99.9 percent of the email marketers out there—business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B)—is not social. It has been used as a broadcast channel.”

“Email can be 1:1,” acknowledges Dave Lewis, newly appointed CMO for Message Systems, “But it also allows for mass communications too. The technology has been there a long time to provide, at least on the content side, relevant messages to a million people simultaneously. You can customize a message to me, and customize one to you, and deploy them all at the same time, along with a million of our closest friends. But frankly a part of the challenge is that it is so inexpensive, it is easy to just not care.” Lewis says that when he talks to CMOs their top concern is the user experience, and they know that to continue to blast their customer particularly through multiple channels is to erode customer loyalty and teach those customers to ignore their messages. “That is essentially what is going on,” he admits. “At some point we have to change the metrics that drives the marketer. We are never going to get rid of the profit motive in companies, and I am not suggesting that we do, but we need to be taking a longer-term view. It is a marketer beware message. The industry has to change or your access to those customers is going to be greatly diminished.”

Miller believes that only in the last year and a half are marketers finally starting to move away from pure batch and blast into more of a lifecycle email marketing approach. “Honestly, as email marketers we have not done such a great job of embracing the social capability of email as a technology. It is really that combination of technology and philosophy that makes this work.” Miller comments that customer views today are so powerful and how consumers will go to 15 sites and do research before contacting a company. “They are completely knowledgeable, but this is not new. It is happening. There are huge masses of consumers and business professionals who buy that way, so we as marketers cannot pretend that this is ‘in the future,’ this is now. In some ways the customer is so far ahead of us. They are looking for opportunities to engage with brands and with products and it is our opportunity and our challenge to use the technology in a way that makes sense.”

EDITOR’S NOTE: This is an excerpt from Targeting the Technology-Wise Customer in the October issue of Messaging News, for the entire story go to: www.messagingnews.com

Published October 23, 2008