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Cheap E-mail Broadcasting: You Get What You Pay For
By Don Lange
Direct Marketing News
December 2003 — You can't help but notice that there are a lot of companies running around offering e-mail deployment at little or no cost. The pricing for these deployment houses is either draped in a complete do-it-yourself type model or wrapped around pontifications proclaiming themselves to be saviors of the e-mail industry.What a bunch of hooey.
Anybody can blast e-mails. What do you think spamming is?
The main reason why spam is so much of a problem is that there is very little barrier to entry. Anybody who has access to e-mail can become a spammer at an incredibly low cost (to them).
Spammers don't really care about quality when deploying their e-mails. They send off millions of e-mails with little or no attention to the structure of the e-mail addresses and certainly no attention to any kind of bounce back or privacy requirements.
In fact they only pay attention to e-mail addresses that click on the removal link – and only because that verifies that the e-mail can be spammed again. Of course the reality is there are so many ways to access e-mail addresses that tracking removal clicks is even becoming too much trouble for the spammers.
Bounceback's are a fact of life in the e-mail world. Sometimes e-mails bounce back because the address itself was wrong, or sometimes there is some kind of problem or program at the receiving end – an ISP is down or there's not enough space to handle the e-mail. No matter how they come back – unless you live in a world that is totally dominated by an ASP application – knowing how to handle data out and data back is an essential part of integrating email marketing into an overall strategy.
Separating the Marketers from the Spammers
E-mail broadcasting is part of a more complex campaign management strategy that requires intimate knowledge of database management techniques.The problem with a lot of these ASP models is that for very little money organizations are able to access an application that supposedly does everything for you including:
- Loading your e-mail addresses.
- Loading your creative.
- Doing your blast.
- Having your undeliverables bounce-back and neatly packaged for you in a database.
There is a menu of database techniques that needs to be followed when executing an e-mail campaign. Broken down, there are 3 components:
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Before Deployment
Preparation is the most important step in the deployment process. Whether you are doing an acquisition or a retention campaign you should have the ability to merge and purge. This means that you must standardize all data sets so that fields of information can be compared with one another. The fact that people have multiple e-mail addresses and they change frequently enough means that the merge should first be executed at the land address level.
If you have lists of people who have asked not to receive any e-mail mailings (if they have reacted angrily to e-mails in the past the industry affectionately dubs these individuals as "flames"), then it is in your best interest to be able to purge them on multiple levels even if they have changed their addresses.
You may as well invest in this ability now because if a national "Do Not E-Mail" list gets introduced in Canada then you will need to be able to integrate it into your own lists quickly.
The pre-deployment stage is also the stage when you create the segments of your campaign that can help you determine what part or parts are working best for you. Like any direct response process you should take advantage of any chance of learning something. This could mean creating price segments, click segments, creative offer, etc. Each component of the campaign needs to be carefully tracked so that responses can be read.
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During Deployment
Database management during a campaign means having the ability to react quickly to anyone who asks that they be removed from your list. Removal requests should flow quickly into both the source of the e-mail deployment as well as any suppression files you are maintaining.
We use the 10-minute rule. Every 10 minutes every e-mail list maintained at Cornerstone gets updated with removal requests and bouncebacks.
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Post Deployment
In a perfect world all people who want to be removed from receiving e-mail mailings dutifully click on the removal link and get neatly deposited into do not mail databases. In the real world you have all sorts of people clicking on reply boxes and sending back replies that range from "get me off all e-mail lists" to "I am going to be out of town for 2 weeks so please don't send me mailings until then". You might even get some auto-replies advising of an address change.
It might sound like a customer service function - and it is. However it is also a database management function, as you need to be able to integrate all sorts of rules into a database where there might be exceptions to those rules.
If You Do It Yourself
Those systems that let you do everything yourself sound like a good deal until you realize how much time and people-power you need to invest into sound campaign management.The bells and whistles that are being added to the ASP models are just that. You can't avoid not having database skills unless you want to avoid having a clean database. Frankly, with what's at stake it is a bit scary to see what so-called solutions are being pushed in today's market.
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