Retention and Relationships : Marketing Thoughts by Michael Greenberg

Its unbelieveable that it took the FTC 4 years to finalize the CAN-Spam rules, but hey, its government.  The most interesting element is the clarity on opt-out requirements, so eloquently interpreted by Ken Magill once again in his article Your Preference Center Could Be Illegal.  Ken points out that since customers must be able to opt out with just one click and without anything other than the email address itself, a typical preference center fails CAN-Spam.

 Ken’s one of my favorite reads.

Walk over to your email marketing manager today and give them a pat on the back, because unless its your job, you have no idea how hard they are working these days.

Ever since reputation monitoring and spam traps became the main component of filtering technology, email marketing went from “segment and send” to a complex dance of response tracking, recency filtering, authentication services, and ISP relations.   Those 500,000 email addresses you had a year ago may be down to less than 100,000 mailable, low-risk customers.  An address that has not responded in 90 to 180 days may now be a spam trap in one of the many monitoring networks that most ISPs use to filter individual messages as well as IP addresses.

Behavior-driven relationship marketing tends to cut through this problem.  So before its too late (and you’ve been blacklisted, your IPs flagged, and dynamic blocks slammed in place with every mailing), start planning on how to shift most or all of your email to a relationship driven approach.  It may take some time to match the prior level of revenue generation, but until you start, you’ll never get there.

Odd how sometimes there’s something so obvious in front of you and it takes months or years to recognize it.  Like a faucet in your kitchen that’s pretty ugly, and one day you realize its a simple task to change it and improve your entire kitchen’s appearance.

I’m seeing this in the technology world as well, where companies suddenly realize they’ve been using crappy technology for a while and there are better and cheaper alternatives.  Most people are familiar with this in the email space, where many companies existed in the early days that were pretty terrible.  Once someone took look around and saw there were plenty of better options, there was a shakeout of bad technology and the good companies took off.  I went through this exact realization in 2003 and switched from a really terrible legacy email service to a top notch one, and cut my costs by 70% at the same time.

Its amazing to me that more companies take more time to select a new application or service than to evaluate their existing capabilities.  In many cases they’ve already moved up the learning curve, know exactly what their business needs, and can move to a more modern solution that provides only what they need.  Instead of focusing on perceived gaps in their capabilities, changing out existing capabilities usually will produce a much greater ROI.