The Email Wars

I was thinking through a topic this week (when a Microsoft Director was presenting on Advertising at OMMA). The topic is - “Should You Be Automating or Manually Delivering Email Campaigns?” There are pros and cons to each side.

I would heavily lean towards automating double opt-in welcome emails, and a customer education/value email flow about the brand, services, expectations of emails/outreach. These are things that SHOULD be done and it makes the most sense to automate. But when I say that, I do not mean to let them lie static. These automated campaigns must be always reviewed, analyzed, tracked to goals AND tweaked constantly. So although you have automated, you actually are manually working on them ALL the time. Kind of a double standard here right? Well not really as most of these are going to be flowing in and out every day and it is your job to watch them and see which minor changes can make an impact.

But then what is truly manual? Reporting, idea generation, opportunity identification, and segmentation based on behaviors - some of these one-off campaigns, and maybe even your newsletters (that is if you are not already using our RSS to emailROI platform to automate that content). But the majority of your manual process will be the copywriting… one of the least favorite parts of the job, I often hear.

I leave you with this, not really a resolution on this topic, but days are too short in most of our lives, so finding ways to automate will win every time.