• by Ryan Deutsch , April 1, 2010

Last weekend, my wife talked me into watching "The Bucket List," a movie I have been trying to avoid for quite a while. I'm happy to report that I liked the movie. I mean, come on, how bad can something with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman actually be? As I am sure many of you did after seeing the movie, I quickly compiled my personal bucket list. Once that was out of the way, I decided to create an aspirational, forward-thinking bucket list for email marketing. Here are a few excerpts:

Achieve engagement over 75%. From speaking to email marketers and reviewing various program key performance indicators, it's apparent that only a portion of our subscribers are engaged with our email communications. Consider click-through rates within your own programs. How are you doing?

As email marketing has matured, it's become more acceptable for fewer subscribers to actually engage with the communications we deliver. I understand why this is acceptable to marketers. After all, even with low engagement numbers, email marketing remains the most profitable channel within the digital marketing arsenal. However, decreased engagement will eventually lead to decreased program performance and a less profitable channel in general.

My bucket list item would be to drive program engagement over 75%. That means a lot of things: (1) Investing significantly in relevance; (2) being brave enough to remove unengaged recipients for my email file ; (3) moving away from broadcast campaigns to purely transactional and lifecycle communications; and so on and so on. Bottom line is, if engagement can be increased, everything else should follow.

Allow consumers to become editors. In a world driven by data, personas, predictive modeling and other "machine"-driven relevance strategies, I think it would be fantastic to take the machines out of the picture completely. What if we created email programs that were 100% customer-driven? The amount of user-generated content available online today, whether via micro blogs or social networks, is unbelievable. Creating email communications completely based on consumer conversation could really take programs to the next level.

Marketers would need some input into this content within the email template, but leveraging data that's freely available in the social Web to populate email dynamically could help email marketers engage an entire set of consumers that current programs just don't reach. Over the past several years, email marketing experts have talked extensively about putting the customer in control; I'm a firm believer in the strategy and would love to see sophisticated email marketers take this concept up a notch.

Attribution. The bucket list has to include an attempt at addressing the attribution questions faced by so many email marketers and the marketing organizations they support. It's still too complicated for email marketers to communicate the true impact that their programs have on an organization's overall online performance. Many email marketers have demonstrated a channel's value by showing overall revenue contribution from email subscribers as compared to overall revenue contribution from other customer segments. Specific attribution tracking done correctly would allow email marketing to gather increased budgets and further enhance the contribution of the channel.

True separation from spam. As someone who's been in the email marketing business for more than a decade, I find nothing more frustrating than explaining to someone what I do and have their first reaction be "OK, so you are a spammer!" ARGHHHH! No email marketer's bucket list would be complete without the goal to remove the word "spam" from the perception of our business.

Legitimate email marketers are arguably the most relevant, sophisticated and consumer-conscious marketers on the planet. Yet, due to the effectiveness of our channel, we are forever associated with those less reputable members of the email marketing community. While I can see a path toward increased engagement, putting consumers in control of content and enhanced attribution tracking, this last bucket list item completely escapes me. Maybe I need to stop telling people I'm in email marketing and simply say I'm in digital marketing.

Is your organization doing anything interesting to increase engagement, increase the integration of user-generated content, or address attribution challenges? If so, please share with us in the comments section. I know many members of the email marketing community would appreciate your insight and experience.