| |||||||||||
PRINT
COMMENT
SUBSCRIBE
RSSNot so.
This week I'm up at the ACCM (Annual Conference for Catalog & Multichannel Merchants), and in many ways it is like traveling back in time. This is a place where call centers rule and publications are printed the way God intended: on paper.
Last night I spoke with a sales rep from a large specialty publication media company. I started talking about email --and the sales rep told me it was something that they just haven't gotten around to. "We have over 6 million people on our lists, but only 300,000 signed up for email. We had a problem with our double opt-ins, and our Web site doesn't really work right." They just hadn't gotten around to spending the time, money and energy to fix their interactive issue, and if the attitude of the rep I talked with is any indication, they felt there was no real urgency to do so.
And at a time where I think the last thing the world needs is another article on growing your email list, I'm surrounded by niche catalog merchants who are still thinking print and seem clueless about how email works or how to get started. It is like stepping into a land that time forgot.
I find myself wanting to shake these folks up: Don't you know that email drives most of the traffic around the Web? Don't you know that consumers of specialty goods and interests are searching the Web for those goods and interests, and forming social networking sites to exchange information?
But maybe it's me that has the problem. With ISPs battling each other and refusing to agree on common reputation and deliverability standards, can you blame someone for just wanting to put a stamp on the envelope to insure their message gets delivered? Can a small specialty publication deal with the time it takes to remain compliant, get delivered, and not get sued by some crazy anti-email gunslinger?
Maybe they know something that those of us in the interactive world don't: that it shouldn't have to be this hard, that individual companies and individuals shouldn't be deciding whose mail gets delivered and who has a warehouse of wilting flowers because their email wasn't delivered at Mother's Day.
Put on stamp. Go to post office. Delivery guaranteed. That is the way it's supposed to work in the Real World.
2 people recommend this article.
RSS FEEDS
Catalog marketers in my experience are incredibly savvy and test-driven, and email is a small part of the strategy because years and years of testing have proved (in the consumer catalog world at least) that a single catalog is 1000 times more effective at driving a sale than an email. A well-done 70-page catalog offers a depth of merchandise, richness of experience, and branding that I've never seen an email match.
Most catalogers get 40+% of their sales via their websites, but the sales curves still follow the mailing of catalogs, not emails. If they are giving email short-shrift, it's because they are following the money to the medium that was new in the 19th century.
Email users will pay a small per-email fee to ensure that the email they send is delivered to its intended audience. Less certain, but plausible, is that email users will pay to ensure that the items in their email inboxes are what they agreed to receive, from senders of their choosing.
This scenario would not be the result of the forced legistlative mandate - you know, the one of the urban email legend variety, that Congress is within a whisker of enacting a Dreaded Email Tax so write your representative now. Rather, some ISP will eventually create a UPS-like service and value when it crafts a "guaranteed" service that everyone will welcome and soon wonder how we lived without.
Nature - and free-market economies - abhor a vaccuum. The vaccuum in the email economy is the strange phenomenon that means it costs nothing more than your time to send an email. "Free" leads to waste -waste of computing resources, waste of time in ensuring delivery/compliance/junk mail filtering, and most of all perhaps a waste of attention in figuring out what's important and what's not.
Corporate emailers already pay dearly for email - entire systems and departments to manage the ever changing factors Bill McClosky writes about. My guess is that if presented with a "guaranteed" delivery option that ISPs and email receivers understood and valued, they would gladly pay a penny or two to utilize - and they'd save substantial mo