IMV30 : Email Marketing's Profound Evolution

The following is a transcript for IMV30 : Email Marketing's Profound Evolution. The original podcast is located here.

Announcer:

Welcome to the Internet Marketing Voodoo podcast brought to you by MindComet. And now, here's your host, Ted Murphy.

Ted Murphy:

Welcome to Internet Marketing Voodoo episode 30. I’m your host Ted Murphy and with me today is Jeanniey Mullen, partner and senior manager of email marketing for Ogilvy, and Paul Beck, senior partner, executive director of interactive marketing and advertising for Ogilvy. Welcome to the show today guys.

Jeanniey Mullen:

Thank you.

Paul Beck:

Thank you.

Ted Murphy:

So Jeanniey and Paul, you are also co-founders of the Email Experience Council. I wondered if you could start off by telling us a little bit about what lead you guys to form the Council and what your mission is.

Jeanniey Mullen:

Sure. Paul and I have both been working in the email and interactive space for a little over ten years. And over that course of time, we’ve seen the evolution of email from something that was the hottest new way of communicating ten years ago providing people with the ability to have two way conversations in real time into a channel that was perceived as nothing good, filled with spam and deliverability issues and essentially just a poor reputation and a vehicle that did nothing but annoy people into what it’s become today, which is the backbone of all digital communications as we see today’s culture evolve into a digitally driven world and rely so much on electronic transmission of communication.

What we’ve seen throughout the ten years as email has evolved is that at no point and time has anybody stood up and recognized the potential power and the value that email as a marketing channel brings to organizations and to clients, nor have we seen anybody stand up and put their foot down or draw a line in the sand and help establish standards for the usage of email to ensure that it’s used appropriately, effectively, and in a manner that can not only create effective, successful communications from a marketing standpoint, but also from a branding standpoint and from a relationship standpoint.

So probably about six or seven months ago we were speaking with a number of other experts and visionaries in the field and we all came to the conclusion that the time was now to see if the rest of the world felt the same as we have and really pull people together who are passionate about email and the impact that it has as a communication vehicle on us in both personal lives and business and really start to do something about it.

And as we talked about it, it became very exciting because we all felt there was a need and a gap in the industry and we started to notice that everybody else we were talking to felt the same thing. But we decided instead of just using strategy and hypothesis and philosophies on what we should do, we should really take all of our ideas and apply them to a specific project to ensure that what we were all saying was actually accurate.

So we started working with a non-profit organization called the RAKMF, which is the Ryan Andrew Kaiser Memorial Foundation. And we pulled the best people, the best email marketing experts across the world, together to help create an email related program that proved that it was an effective, positive communication channel with a lot of power.

And through the results that we received with that project, we got a groundswell of support from clients, from advertising agencies, from vendors, and from the media, that there was a need to form a council that would focus holistically on how to leverage email as a standards and best practices approach to communicating with customers and establishing email as the digital backbone for the future.

So we built the Email Experience Council only a few months ago and have continued to see a phenomenal response from the marketplace with people who are really interested in learning how they can better use email and more importantly, helping us to identify what the standard should be.

Ted Murphy:

So what is the size of the council at this time?

Jeanniey Mullen:

After only about 60 days being live, we’ve got over 5,000 subscribers and a few hundred paid members and a number of paid sponsors who are helping us spread the word through the different trade shows and media organizations and really be advocates for us.

Paul Beck:

The reality is – there is we’ve done very little advertising. It’s been really sort of advocacy based because as we engage these agencies and companies and technology providers in this sort of dialogue around what this thing is all about, they are actually helping us to spread the word.

We actually have a very rudimentary website up currently that we’re in the process of redesigning and deploying in the next couple of weeks. We’ve got a ground well support for content, but as well as advocacy and spreading the word.

Ted Murphy:

So are most of those members – are they tending to be email marketers, advertising agencies, the actual vendors that are providing a lot of the backbones for these systems? What does the makeup look like?

Jeanniey Mullen:

Actually, no. It’s been very interesting. About 80% of our subscribers and members are coming from the client side. They’re people that work at Kimberly Clark, at Hewlett Packard, at IBM, you know all over the place, from clients, large and small.

That’s the majority of the people that are involved in this organization, which really speaks to the need for it across the globe as something that affects everybody regardless of what your job is. And absolutely, the other 20% is made up of advertising agencies like Ogilvy, agency.com, MRM, and also smaller interactive shops and vendors who are taking an interest in this from a networking standpoint as well.

Paul Beck:

What’s interesting about the fact that most of our subscriber and membership base is made up of individual companies, it actually points to the need for those who are in the email marketing space who recognize that there’s a lot of work that can and should be done within their own companies, organizationally as an example, to make sure email is right.

And we can certainly talk a little bit more about that. But what we’ve found is that when we connected through some of the events that we’ve been at and through our communications and through some of the round table groups we’ve actually formed, when we put companies together with companies, there are so many commonalities that they have around getting it right within the email channel.

It could be organization. It could be budgetary. It could be technology wise, but they are all having many challenges that are very similar. And having access to each other has been extremely beneficial to them and really is more or less the sort of cornerstone for what this foundation has been founded, which is access and working together to actually come up with some really strong solutions to where we are today.

Ted Murphy:

So you mentioned that one of the reasons that this council was formed was obviously email marketers have a lot of questions. They have a lot of issues. What do you think the number one challenge is today for a company or an organization that’s trying to use email marketing as part of their marketing mix?

Jeanniey Mullen:

I would have to say the number one challenge that people are facing is how to use all of the great and robust technology that’s out there that enables you to develop that dynamic content and segment your messages and do trigger, multi-touch campaigns and integrate that into their current company infrastructure and capabilities.

What we see most often are clients coming to us, not necessarily asking what is the appropriate click through rate for my industry. We get those questions all the time. But more so asking, “Okay. If I want to make my campaign successful, but my company will not allow me to do multi-touch marketing or use dynamic content because I’m the only person and it takes more resources than that to get it done, how do I build an effective email campaign within the constraints that I have to live with?”

And then the second question we get after that is, “Okay. Here’s what I’ve done. Is this acceptable compared to what everybody else in the marketplace is doing?”

Paul Beck:

I think one of the other things that you’ll find when you peel back the onion is those type of questions that Jeanniey is talking about, they tend to be around people who are marketers and at least have some understanding of what email, the power of email, and what email is.

These are people that are dealing with it, whether it be from a service standpoint, from a marketing standpoint, from an e-newsletter standpoint. The other problem that we have is a perception issue. And what we find is that when we talk to many marketing and advertising executives who are not really aware of the email channel, they tend to sort of react to this channel in a very emotional way.

And they tend to render opinions immediately about a strategy that will bring forth with email. And the reality is that although emotions will drive opinions, the numbers will drive the facts. And the fact is that the email channel is the largest channel in the world. It’s one of the most effective channels in the world.

And we have to do a really good job of making sure that we get this information up high enough into an organization, up at the sea level, that they will start thinking about funding it more appropriately, which is one of the round tables that we’ve put together, is actually how to get the word high enough into the organization that it will be funded appropriately.

I mean statistically if you look at the numbers, I mean there’s probably five or six at least different types of email communications that will come out of a company to one single customer, yet multiple divisions will run those individual email communications.

There’s an opportunity to send wrong brand messages through those as well as people think, “Well, this is spam and I don’t want to do that.” Reality is it’s not. A company cannot function without the use of email.

The reality is is that still at a very senior level in most companies, that fact has not worked its way up high enough into the organization. And we’re working to change that perception as well.

Ted Murphy:

Each of you separately now, I’d like to know what you think is the number one mistake that email marketers consistently make.

Jeanniey Mullen:

I would have to say that it’s their database segmentation strategies and list management. What we see time and time again is that campaigns have deliverability issues. They have poor response issues or over time campaigns, you see a huge drop off in response rates.

And the focus tends to immediately turn to the creators and the offer. And there’s a lot of focus and effort then put in optimizing the creative, changing the offer, when the reality is the identification of the potential group of customers that the message is being sent to has either lost its quality over time and people are being communicated with too frequently or with the wrong messages, or it hasn’t been set up effectively from the beginning or we’re seeing that there is no strategy for communicating with customers.

And it’s just a very poor experience. I think that what most companies forget when they’re creating email campaigns is that to pulse point, there are eight different types of email messages that a company could send out that range from service based emails like, “Thanks for paying your invoice,” to marketing messages or even branding and awareness messages about a company.

People tend to forget that it is one human being who is receiving all of those messages. And if they’re not set with some common thread or string to tie together and build the feeling that you’re not randomly blasting somebody with one off messages, but you’re sending them to them in the basis of a relationship, then you lose the impact and effectiveness.

So it goes back to the database and the way the database is managed and segmented, in my opinion.

Paul Beck:

And I would actually build upon that in my news, really the tale end of what Jeanniey said. And that is the lack of a really holistic view of the communications and how they wrap around a single customer.

And again the reality is is that you could have, of the eight types of email communications that you may receive from a particular company, you may have just one of those particular groups that’s sending it out following every possible best practice that they can in order to ensure that that one single email that that person is receiving is done well.

It’s got the highest level of deliverability. It’s got the highest open rates. It’s being read and reacted to in a positive way because of all the technologies and the strategies and the creative that we can optimize templates with.

But the reality is is that the very next email they get may come from another group who doesn’t follow any of those. And all the work that you’ve done thus far has been ruined because the company is not looking at this as one single centered customer.

They’re looking at it separate channels as they send out. And the reality is it’s the person who’s receiving this is receiving an email. It doesn’t matter who it’s coming from. It’s got the name of the company on the front end of it, so the perception is is that this is one company.

A very similar sort of experience that people have is when they will call into a company many times and try to solve a problem. And when they call in and when they talk to one group, they get one story. And then when they call another group, they may get a different story or they may have to give a whole set of information they’ve already given.

This is very similar in this sort of way that we approach. And again it’s database driven, but it’s not consumer centric. And I think that in – for my opinion is not taking the host if you have a customer, and if a customer raises their hand in some way, shape, or form to participate in a more deep basis than some type of email program, you’ve got to modify all other communication programs.

So the reality is I don’t think that many companies are taking that sort of customer centric view of it and really from an experience standpoint.

Ted Murphy:

So where do each of you see the future of email marketing as a medium heading into the next 24 to the next 48 months? Are we gonna see a lot more rich media video? Are we gonna see more segmentation, better targeting? Paint me a picture.

Jeanniey Mullen:

What we see is we see that email’s time as a bells and whistle or novelty has really come to an end because people are now seeing email as something that is much more standard in their life and just becoming accepted as a part of their daily life.

There was a recent statistic of a study that was done in the UK that asked what type of channel do people use for personal communication. It had the telephone, regular mail, IM, and what came out of that was the 49% of the time people were using email as their main way to have a personal communication with somebody.

And that’s phenomenal. So we see email evolve from an initial novelty, you know, ten years ago into something that was more marketing based. And now it’s come full circle. And it is electronic communication. It’s exactly what its name says.

So where we’re really excited about seeing it move to the future is we’re expecting it to move into a more foundational role. As we see mass advertising change from being something that’s distributed primarily through TV and print into something that’s being distributed primarily through TV and print, but also significantly through online digital channels, social networks and communities.

We see email as establishing the one main tie into the relationship with a human being regardless of the digital communication channel you use. So email will not be seen in the next 24 to 48 months as a separate communication channel. It will still have reasons and a purpose to be seen as that on occasion. But it will be seen as the – as almost the bridge for all other digital communication channels.

Paul Beck:

In my mind, one of the trends that I hope – I don’t know that the adoption, because I think it’s a little bit further out to be a much larger adoption at this point. But I do expect that the more progressive companies who understand the digital medium a little bit better are gonna do this.

And building on what Jeanniey’s talking about as email being the digital backbone, I think you’re gonna see companies organize around that. Each individual component gets better, the database, the opt-in strategy, deliverability, creative.

As all these elements and messaging become better and better within an organization, you’re gonna start to see the companies who get it right organize themselves in such a way that they can manage all of the eight types of emails that will come out of a company.

That being said, if you get that right, you then get right the ability to do mobile. You then get right to do the ability to do downloadable desktop applications, etcetera, because as Jeanniey mentioned email is database driven central. So are these.

So if your organization is right for doing it this way, it becomes relatively cost effective to lay these channels into the same organizational structure. So instead of having potentially a separate mobile group who’s establishing best practices all over the world doing different things, you can at least lay it on the same type of group, set up the same type of metrics, although they may be measured slightly differently.

But there’s such an advantage from a scalability standpoint and from a basically company adoption of a new channel using this email organization. To me that’s gonna be one of the future because again, if you think about it, email has all the components, including things that are based on the web as all the other components do.

So if you could just sort of lay them on top, you’d be able to get to them much more quickly and much more effectively. So I think one of the trends you’re gonna see is companies organizing themselves appropriately and being able to use the same groups to adopt these additional channels.

We’re seeing that start to occur in some of the clients that Ogilvy deals with. We’re certainly seeing that in the agencies that we work with in the EEC where the person who’s responsible for email on a VP level is also responsible for the other digital channels, including mobile and including desktop applications, etcetera.

Ted Murphy:

Well Jeanniey and Paul, I appreciate all the input that you’ve given us here. If our listeners want some more information, they can visit your website at emailexperience.org. I hope you’ll come back in the future and tell us about all the great things that you’ve been able to do with the organization and I wish you much luck.

Paul Beck:

Thank you so much.

Jeanniey Mullen:

Thank you.

Announcer:

For more information on this week's topic, visit http://www.InternetMarketingVoodoo.com. This podcast has been brought to you by MindComet, the Relationship Agency.

[End of Audio]

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