Gene Carr's Patron Technology Blog

When Opt-in E-mail Becomes Spam

I haven't written specifically about e-mail in a while, and before I take my eye off the ball, I thought it would be good to revisit one of the trickiest aspects of e-mail marketing. If there was one mantra that can't be repeated too often it is that e-mail marketing is all about R E L E V A N C E. If you send juicy, up-to-date, interesting stuff to your readers, they will open, read, and respond. I've been saying this in various ways for years, and so have most of my colleagues.

Today I read something that brings home this message in an even more stark way. According to a study by Q Interactive/Marketing Sherpa (which you can read here): 

"Fifty-six percent of consumers consider marketing messages from known senders to be spam if the message is 'just not interesting to me.'"

What consumers are saying is that even if you get them to opt-in properly, and don't over-mail them, they equate irrelevant content to spam. This also gives a lot of additional credence to continually segmenting your lists. 

As you think about your own e-mail editorial plan, I urge you to think like a publisher as much (or more) than you think like a marketer.

The Newest Coolest Technology from the Source of All New Cool Things

This morning I was at the keynote speech at the NTEN annual conference, taking place in New Orleans. The speaker was David Pogue, the NY Times's highly engaging and amusing technology writer. His speech was a "what's hot" in new technology for non-profits, and he focused on a lot of free or very inexpensive services. Since I follow his column, I didn't find that much new.

However, one thing he showed knocked me out, and you'll quickly see why. Yesterday, I was walking around New Orleans and wanted to find the name and address of a restaurant -- I knew it was called "Mothers" but that was about it. I used the Google 411 service (which is at 800-466-4411). It's a completely voice-activated service, but unlike the normal 411 service, it's free. It's also pretty clunky and I never actually got the information I was looking for, after about four tries in the space of ten minutes.

So, this morning as I was listening to Mr. Pogue, he started extolling the virtues of Google's text-messaging information service. You can send a text to 46645, and find out things like airline arrival times, weather forecasts, directions, and a whole host of other information. As he was giving his talk I sent a text with the words "mother's restaurant new orleans," and within about three seconds I got a response with complete information about the restaurant, including the address and a phone number (try it yourself!).

Aside from wanting to share this information, and to report that the restaurant had amazing seafood gumbo, it occurred to me that this service proves yet again how far ahead text-based queries are vs. voice-activated inquiries. I'll probably write more about what Pogue had to say in future posts, but this little item was so useful I wanted to share it first.

TiVo and the Future of Advertising - The revolution is coming, slowly but surely

Many years ago, well before the general public had ever heard of TiVo, there was a cover story in The New York Times Magazine about how TiVo and other similar technologies were going to allow consumers to "time-shift" their tv-watching, and in doing so completely revolutionize the advertising industry. 

Much to my surprise, eight years later, the effects of TiVo and DVRs are only now just penetrating the advertising world, and there's a lot of turmoil in the industry as the old precepts of television advertising are giving way. Yesterday I read this article about a study in the U.K., which shows that 79% of people who have the technology that gives them ability to skip through commercials actually do so. Presumably they do this manually, fast-forwarding through each commercial break. Now, I have a friend who is a bit of a self-taught programmer, and he has rigged his computer such that he can watch television on it and it automatically skips all the commercials. I figure won't be long before this kind of technology becomes widespread.

The point of all this is that we're still just seeing the very beginning of the revolution that's coming to consumer advertising. Now that there's research that shows that consumers will avoid the commercials that have been thrust in front them, advertisers are going to be forced to seek other ways to reach them.

My bet is that in the next few years, we'll be reading headlines talking about a huge amount of transplanted advertising -- moving from the relatively mass market of television, to the much more targeted arena of the Web. It's already happening, but I think the press and the stock market have both greatly underestimated what's coming. In the last week or so, Google's stock price dipped over fears of lower advertising revenue. That's very short-term thinking.

I think we're just seeing the tip of the iceberg. In another few years, advertising will be increasingly targeted, and Web advertising will become the dominant form of advertising to consumers, and will be supported by traditional media, rather than the other way around.

E-mail Segmentation Still the Next Big Thing

For the last several years, I've attended the Marketing Sherpa annual conference on e-mail marketing, and last year I spoke at it. I decided not to go this year, partly in favor of attending other conferences, and partly because the coverage of the event is getting better and better each year. I just looked at this year's summary which you can read for yourself here.

There's a lot to learn from just reading this summary, and I encourage you to do so. Meanwhile, I'd like to excerpt just one take-away:

The issues of segmentation and relevancy were -- by hook or by crook -- party to nearly every discussion heard during the three days. And an increasing number of marketers are splintering their lists into up to 12 or 14 different files.

"The focus has shifted to relevancy and the importance of segmentation," says Jayne Lytel, Executive Director, The Early Intervention Network. "It's almost more important to have a smaller list than to have a huge list that is not performing as well. I plan to go back and clean our lists and segment it better, while not taking the one-size-fits-all approach."

Now, your lists may be too small to segment into 12 files, but again, the conference highlights something I've been saying for a long time - that a "one-size-fits-all" e-mail strategy should eventually give way to much more targeted messaging to your patrons and donors.