• by Bill McCloskey , December 5, 2006

The Email Insider Summit kicked off with not one but two strong keynote addresses addressing the role of e-mail in a Web 2.0 World. By Web 2.0, we mean the convergence (man, remember that term?) of technologies such as e-mail, RSS, SMS, search, podcasting, social networking, user-generated content and a plethora of other media that marketers are trying to wrap their heads around. In that context, as Cisco's Brian Ellefritz put it, e-mail seems so 10 years ago--especially when discussing it with upper management.

The day started with a keynote by Denis McGrath, international marketing manager at Procter & Gamble. McGrath started out by asking: How do you create a marketing message around low-involvement brands? For instance, do you really want to receive a weekly marketing message on toilet paper? How about batteries?

The answer is aggregation, he said. P&G has dozens of well-known brands that fall into the category of low-involvement brands. None of them have messages that you'd want to get every week--or even every month. But you may want to hear from them once or twice a year.

With so many of these brands to choose from at P&G, each can have their moment in the sun in the Every Day Solutions newsletter, which provides coupons, specials, and product introductions. McGrath used the metaphor of a stained-glass window. Individual pieces of glass might be overlooked or thrown away, but put them together in an interesting way and you have a work of art. That is how he views the EDS newsletter

E-mail success is based on relevance, McGrath noted. For instance, for the Pampers brand, the newsletter is first sent when the mother is prenatal. At this stage, the mother is very interested in things that affect her pregnancy--and so subjects like the effect of airport metal detectors and even sex during pregnancy (the only time you will see sex mentioned in a P&G marketing effort, McGrath stressed) arrive once a week. Once the baby is born, P&G realizes that the mother is overwhelmed with lots of things and so the newsletter shifts to a once-a-month frequency and follows the lifeline of the baby. Relevance is driven by age and stage of the baby. It is key that P&G gain the trust of the mother in order to be able to provide highly relevant content, and so the Welcome Letter is important in framing exactly what the e-mail recipient is going to receive.

But there is trouble in River City. McGrath said he worries about what he calls the shrinking inbox: one filled with clutter and reduced click-throughs and open rates. One of the biggest problems, he said, is that consumers have been trained to use the spam button to unsubscribe from newsletters. Consumer advocacy sites like Consumer Reports have trained people not to trust the opt-out links, and so people report e-mail as spam instead of just unsubscribing. The other factor is that people just change over time, and an e-mail that was relevant last year may not be this year. We need to fix the "Mark As Spam" mentality, he warned.

Brian Ellefritz, director of global customer relationship marketing for Cisco Systems, wondered if e-mail has lost its way. Trying to explain its relevance to upper management may be a challenge, he noted, especially when the negative aspects of e-mail rub up against them everyday when they check their own inbox. Brian asked how e-mail will fit into the context of this Web 2.0 world, with so many technologies and platforms screaming for attention. And yet, he noted, those whose careers have been dedicated to e-mail marketing are in the best position to take a leadership role in steering their companies through the integration challenges that these new technologies bring to each organization.