Commentary

Strategic E-Thinking

Council promotes best practices, trends, and strategies

E-mail is a great marketing tool, but despite the movement over the last few years toward centralized databases and integrated marketing programs, some agencies and e-mail solutions providers remain at odds with the siloed approach most companies continue to take with the medium.

E-mail services providers such as Gather.com and Pivotal Veracity, along with agencies like MRM Worldwide, OgilvyOne Worldwide, and Agency.com, have banded together to form the Email Experience Council to focus more awareness on the strategic value of e-mail marketing.

"I formed the council after noticing that the power of e-mail marketing as a strategic discipline and backbone of digital messaging was being misused, if not overlooked by many prominent companies," says Jeanniey Mullen, senior director and partner of e-mail marketing, OgilvyOne Worldwide. "It wasn't that people didn't believe e-mail was a viable marketing channel; I just felt they didn't know how to effectively integrate it into existing marketing plans."

She felt that too many white papers, case studies, and articles in the marketplace showed companies using e-mail as a standalone channel, or as a tactical device without including a strategic element. Mullen says this sends the wrong signal to companies pursuing e-mail marketing programs. "It scared me," she says, "because the future of digital messaging demands a real-time dynamic messaging environment supported by databases and feeds and leveraging e-mail as the backbone."

To promote the strategic benefits of e-mail marketing, the Council will create an e-mail campaign for the Ryan Andrew Kaiser Memorial Foundation (rakmf.org), including designing the communications strategy, creating an acquisition program, redesigning the organization's e-newsletter, establishing a social network on gather.com, and other elements.

The Council plans to document and share collective learning and best practices from the program on its site, emailexperience.org. The site will also feature case studies and data. "We hope to increase the perceived impact of e-mail on marketing efforts," says Mullen.

 

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