• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, December 8, 2015

Think about email marketing, like a big varied expensive menu at a restaurant -- perhaps a long term meal decision.

Speaking at MediaPost’s Email Insider Summit, Dela Quist, chief executive officer of AlchemyWorx: "We tend to treat each email like a separate event that is not affected by anything before or anything afterwards. The attribution is all about that single snapshot taken at that time."

Quist says email marketers will do so much better in focusing on the emails that aren’t the trigger to get someone to buy. He says it’s all about "framing.’ “When you go to a restaurant, and you see some stupidly expensive thing on the menu. It’s there to make everything else look cheap,” he says.

Many email marketers focus too much on the “trigger” emails that get people to buy. But he says, “it was those three emails before that was more likely to interact with a personal message [that gets consumers to buy]." Quist adds: "We don’t do enough work using email as media channel.”

He says marketers should look at the three emails a week many will send out -- which in also counting holiday emails, could amount to some 200 a year -- “not the one trigger that went out and got a 75% open rate that we all get excited about.”