Chris Baggott's Email Marketing Best Practices

Email Services Providers: Web 2.0 and SaaS

Dion Hinchcliffe had a great post last night with two of my favorite terms: The Long Tail & Software.

In this post he gives a great argument why email is such a perfect Web 2.0 Enterprise, Long Tail application....all without ever mentioning email :)

Here are some key quotes:

....Given that, almost any IT system is going cost in the hundreds of thousands or low millions even to get off the ground. This means that many smaller, niche demands, which statistically, are very likely to be larger than the demand for big IT systems in an organization (The Long Tail), are actually continuing to go dramatically underserved and block access to solutions that could enable local tacit interactions.

.....This means that unless an IT system can afford to be a loss leader for some reason, a great many automation and tacit interactions scenarios are going untapped due to returns that won't exceed initial investment in any reasonable timeframe. This is where SaaS and Web 2.0 has the potential to help. We can see even now the relentless push out on the Web to dramatically simplify development models in order to attack old problems with radically simpler and cheaper solutions.

.......So too are we starting to see end user tools that require little or no IT involvement that allow savvy users to combine data from multiple sources (enterprise mashup tools like Kapow), create visual business processes that reuse existing IT assets (example: Bridgewerx), and to create ad hoc collaborative environments (blogs and wikis.)

And this brings us to one last fine point. Self-service IT can be done with either SaaS or Web 2.0. But lest we forget, SaaS and Web 2.0 are overlapping but different concepts. SaaS represents online, hosted software that can be obtained on-demand while Web 2.0 is essentially about enabling collectively built online collections of shared information. SaaS and Web 2.0 can both be delivered on the Web, but the former tends to provide more function than data, and the latter tends to provide more data than function.

On demand Email Service Applications fit this bill perfectly. We require little or no IT involvement and allow savvy users to combine data from multiple sources, manage workflows and leverage existing IT assets (read: Data).

I’m really intrigued by the final distinction between web 2.0 and SaaS. Email Applications cover both. We’re Web 2.0 because it’s Software that enables collective leverage of shared information…think Web Analytics, CRM, Call Center Data as well as existing content. We’re Saas because we are online, hosted business application software…that can be put into the hands of savvy users vs. IT.

Oh...and the Long Tail part? Go back to the quote above: "This means that many smaller, niche demands, which statistically, are very likely to be larger than the demand for big IT systems in an organization (The Long Tail)"

Dion is right. the opportunity for small niche business applications are much larger combined than mainstream "big iron" software. Every organizaion on the planet is using or will use email as part of it's overall marketing and communication strategy.

So why is this issue so important to me? Two reasons. Until marketers understand the life-altering power of Web 2.0 concepts as it applies to business applications software they will keep looking at email as another media....like cheap paper or some other abused mass marketing tool where the value is reach & frequency instead of data integration, engagement and true lifetime value.

Secondly, Software writers & analysts have to learn that this is reality. I see every day conficting stories as to the viablity of SaaS Enterprise Software Applications in the real world and the shool that denies that Web 2.0 even exists.

Guess What? It's all true. Companies like ExactTarget have been proving it for over 5 years serving thousands of paying customers, generating profits and growing every day.

How can I get better control over the e-mail messages coming out of my organization?

Chip House had a great QA in B2B today. 

How can I get better control over the e-mail messages coming out of my organization?

Answer:

With corporate governance in the spotlight, it is wise to scrutinize outbound e-mail for any risk and exposure it could potentially present to your organization or brand. This is especially true if you work in a regulated industry, such as pharmaceuticals or financial services, in which laws govern what your employees can and cannot say, to whom and at what time.

In nearly every enterprise organization, hundreds—even thousands—of business units, divisions, remote offices and individuals generate outbound e-mail communications with little if any oversight. Inadequate knowledge as to how all these individuals handle e-mail has led to major concerns over brand control and consistency as well as legal compliance, including CAN-SPAM. The liability for companies is enormous.

To address the complexities of creating consistent and compliant e-mail, organizations should strive for an integrated approach that focuses on three things:

1. Brand integrity. Set up parameters for business units, such as whether they may create their own e-mails or use only preapproved templates, and whether they are allowed to use their own photos. Provide completed e-mail templates that can be customized by business units yet still maintain the branding. Use an e-mail service provider that allows you to easily personalize and send e-mails on behalf of your sales reps, store owners or franchisees.
2. Subscriber management. Adopt flawless subscriber management practices. Even large organizations are mandated by CAN-SPAM to honor unsubscribes enterprisewide within 10 days. The best way to do so is to provide a local unsubscribe list for each business unit, as well as an enterprisewide master unsubscribe list. Limit access to subscriber databases by publishing segmented groups to business units. Create a profile attribute map and then lock this map so individual business units cannot modify data or delete subscribers. However, give subscribers the ability to modify their own profiles. Also, I recommend locking the business unit “from” field to protect your organization against a business unit misrepresenting itself, and setting a limit to the number of e-mails a group can send within a period of time.

3. Enterprise

   governance. Give control and auditing features to administrators to ensure that subscribers, profiles and e-mail are being used as intended. The things administrators will want to manage include:

• The number of times individual business units access their account.
• The total number of e-mails sent and delivered for each business unit and the enterprise in total.
• The number of subscriber import and export jobs.
• List upload failures (due to invalid addresses, expired domains or spam-trap addresses).
• The amount of potential spam triggers found in e-mail content.

Chip House

is VP-privacy and deliverability at ExactTarget (www.exacttarget.com), an Indianapolis-based provider of permission-based e-mail marketing solutions.