Email Guru Pushes Data, Warns Against Paralysis

SCOTTSDALE, AZ - Many email marketers are neglecting their medium's most useful capabilities, making it more of an art than the sophisticated science it should be, a top interactive agency executive warned email marketing executives gathered here on Tuesday.

"We've gotten so busy that we base our decisions on intuition as opposed to data," asserted David Baker, vice-president of email marketing and analytical solutions for Agency.com during the second day of MediaPost's "Email Insider Summit."

At once cerebral and personable, sardonic and sympathetic, Baker called for more cost-efficient research that would enables accurate market segmentation - and with it, far greater personalization of email campaigns.

"Do you know how many market segments Amazon has?" he asked the audience before revealing it's 140,000. And of course Microsoft, eBay, HP, and IBM also assiduously collect segmentation data.

Baker acknowledged that data overload is a big problem for agencies and email marketers, noting, "Everybody's paralyzed these days" by the "normalization of information," using a slide of the relevant measures for market segmentation to make his point. It included: site activity, open rates, call center response, survey data, banner ad response, sales data, search data, and click-through rates.

"Our challenge is, how do you spend the time?," he said, then offered a refreshingly simple solution. Recounting a client who offered him data on 9 million consumers, Baker said: "If you focus in on all 9 million records and the problems they represent, you'll never get anywhere. You take the top one percent, and model against that -- that's how you execute and that's how you build brands. Work with that."

And what's the benefit of all this segmentation research? More personalization of marketing emails, according to Baker - and not just in terms of content. "Mass customization," as he called it, will lead to far greater email relevance, a key issue when consumers have been empowered with spam buttons to punish marketers. But relevance isn't just what's in the email, Baker explained, it also includes the timing of individual emails, the order of emails when several are delivered sequentially, email salutations and subject lines. And, of course, the product itself.

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