The Email Wars

I guess that if you get a few emails a week from a campaign that it can continue to give fodder for a blog post. I noticed this email from Michelle tonight but I was a little confused about who it was targeted to? I realized that they had never asked for gender preferences, wait, or preferences as a whole at sign up or ever. I think that they asked me for my Zip or state but that was it. And even that I am not sure of. They might just be matching my data back to another database for state voter records.

So in following best practices… shouldn’t they be doing some progressive list profiling with all the opportunities/campaigns they have emailed me since last summer? Maybe one email that says “Tell us more about you”, or “Take a moment to allow us to learn about you and what is important to you in this campaign?”

Overall it has not made a lick of difference until this email. This email, IMHO, would be best served to be sent to women influencers that would spread the word to other women, not to men that would spread the word. Using like genders would have a greater impact.

But this leads to the larger question about segmentation and listening to your email subscriber base. Over dinner tonight with one of my colleagues that blogs at ReturnOnSubscriber we discussed just how many marketers feel about their database and how they use it. It seems to us that the larger mentality of those using email as a medium feel that once they have you opted in, they can decide what you should get, what you are subscribed to, and how to give you the best data. Now this could be true IF they are gathering more data on you, looking at your behaviors, asking you to tell them more, but not when they are just randomly OR even purposefully adding you to another campaign.

It is a strike out.

If you are going to be good at email marketing you need to treat it as a serious job, not an after thought of just getting the campaign out. I feel that many marketers just assume that a certain percentage will respond, some will not, some will delete, and others will unsub. Just the rules of the game for the most part to many of them. Bad rules to follow and market by.

So your task, should you choose to be a leader and want to get better results, is to start listening, looking at data and striving to build a relationship with ME, not your list.