• by editor , David Baker , August 4, 2008

For years, consultants held back the secrets of their trade and intellectual properties in order to drive higher margins for those services the client can't figure out.

In the email marketing world, there are only a few mysteries left. Here are a few that I think are unique to the email marketing world.

• Deliverability and ISP relations: Keeping up with the daily changes at the ISPs is both mysterious and cumbersome. This is why a few vendors have extended their service offerings to cater to various delivery, monitoring and resolution services. If you are a novice to email marketing, my advice is, don't worry about deliverability and pay the "margin" to have it handled for you. Your executives will struggle to understand the value of your efforts around this issue and it gets so tactical, it will drive you mad. I have a real respect for consultants who make a living in this area.

• Content management: We still haven't figured out great methods to manage content such as graphics across systems for design, production and delivery. Most email production environments rely on their partners' image hosting environment and few leverage a content management system or internal libraries to make storage, retrieval, reuse and archiving efficient.

• Analytics and analysis: There is a big difference between these. You will pay most deeply for analytics (the process of structuring data into a meaningful format so that it can be analyzed), but the margin is in the analysis. Who should we send to? How often? What value does it really bring to our business? How much value does email provide to the Web site, store or partners' sales efforts? Interpretation is a daunting task, and simplifying it enough so it can be iterative is where the mystery lies. Aside from some of the more prolific mailers, most people struggle with anything past direct primary email results rendered through your email delivery system.

• Testing: You may be surprised to see testing included in this list, but I've sat through enough meetings where a marketer wants to build testing into their operation or do it better, to know there is still a mystery surrounding it. Aside from the proverbial A/B tests or ad hoc offer tests and subject lines, not many really understand the essence and value to a business of testing.
  
  Testing is an exercise in efficiency. The reason we have Tagucci and multivariate testing is to streamline and validate the assumptions we make. I find that most companies don't know the tradeoffs of each style and value for testing and generally lose sight of it. In my opinion, companies should commit to a testing methodology annually or biannually, or they're just wasting time. A colleague of mine said once, "If you plan to have children five years after getting married, don't let environmental conditions derail your mission or you'll end up being 50 before you have any children." If your mission is testing, commit to it, plan it well and build performance around it. While iteration is in the nature of marketing, without this mission you'll test yourself in circles and see little value in the end. My question to you is: "What are five things you learned from your testing efforts in 2008 that you can use in planning for 2009?" (Love to see your responses in the blog.)

• Competitive analysis: It's not the reason you make changes, but it's a proxy for change. If you strive to reach parity with a competitor's program, you'd better invest in learning what they do well, monitor it and build reviews so you understand everything that is happening monthly. Few companies that I've seen commit to regular competitive analysis; they rely on their vendors to provide this insight, or else just do it poorly. This can be done at many levels. (I wrote about this months ago. See https://www.mediapost.com/blogs/email_insider/?p=372)

For years, I never wrote, spoke or participated in the industry, since I doubted there would be a return for me in providing free intellectual property. My opinion has changed in the last four years, as I've realized that most companies are not in a position to do everything consultants say, anyway. Many aren't able to see outside their own chaotic world, and it benefits us all to invest in sharing ideas that help create motion and change.

There is little mystery in email, but huge value and margin in services that provide support to the areas of which I speak today. There are many more, but 700 words only gets us so far in one column!