Email Pros Call For Restraint, Greater Coordination

SCOTTSDALE, AZ - Email marketers who don't want to alienate their audience must have tight control over their organizations and carefully coordinate all the different kinds of email contact they make with customers to avoid pestering or overwhelming them, according to a panel of leading execs who discussed the subject on the second day of MediaPost's "Email Insider Summit" here.

Andy Goldman, associate director of email marketing for OgilvyOne Worldwide, paid particular attention to what he called the "cadence and spacing" of email communications.

"One of the things we look at with all our clients is the actual email cadence across multiple campaigns so when you touch people," he said, "and the way you touch people is spaced so that those individual brand messages are given their due right to make impact."

Brian Ellefritz attributed excessive email volume to "leakage" in "governance and policy" in corporate management. While upper-level execs may understand the need for moderation in the abstract, their failure to craft strategic plans for their underlings creates a vacuum where they may adopt an "entrepreneurial" -- that is, over-zealous -- attitude toward email marketing. "That method works better than just spam-ing and mass market emails with no duration, no business intent other than the short-term business cycle," Ellefritz said. "You can demonstrate that nurturing processes work."

Ellefritz's sentiments were seconded by Syd Jones, senior manager of worldwide demand generation e-marketing for IBM, who warned against what he called "customer collision" resulting from a failure to adopt a comprehensive strategy. "We may be relying too much on systems... more than the conversation among our marketers... You need the systems to support your strategy, but I think we're relying on the systems too much."

That execs are often out of touch with the actual intensity of email marketing operations was made abundantly clear by Tim Dolan, who said "count all email channels - account servicing, newsletters, marketing communications" - "can be very eye-opening. "The word 'terrifying' comes to mind," agreed Goldman, eliciting a ripple of nervous laughter from the audience.

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