The Long Tail of Email Marketing

Some of you might have seen a version of this in DM news last week.. Here is the unedited version:

So by now most of us are familiar with the concepts behind Chris Andersons thinking in his great book: The Long Tail (read the long tail blog)

For those not too familiar, the concept is: when the constraints of shelf space are taken away there is presented a big opportunity for the selling of merchandize that can be quite profitable in really small quantities. Favorite examples include Netflix which sells small volumes of movies that would never make it onto the shelves of your local Blockbuster. The argument goes that the aggregation of all of these low selling items add up to a combined significant market. After all, is it any harder for Netflix to rent 100,000 videos spread across 200 titles or 2,000?

What I really like about the concepts behind The Long Tail is what it does to the 80/20 rule. In the 80/20 world you only stock the 20% of the titles that 80% of your customers want. Given that, it’s a really fun exercise to look for other places the Long Tail displaces the 80/20 rule. Try it yourself at home...it’s really fun.

What I’m excited about is the Long Tail of Email Marketing.

In the old marketing world when we looked at customer loyalty, we just knew that 80% of our business came from 20% of our customers. This was the 80/20 rule of customer loyalty. When we looked at our marketing budget, we made decisions based on targeting the 20% of customers who drove that 80% of our business. (If we were good marketers that is)

Why did we do this? Cost & Complexity.

In the terrestrial marketing world (paper, broadcast) there is a lot of struggle with the execution and distribution of marketing messages. This of course is very frustrating considering that now every company for the most part has at least a small data record for every contact. Think of all the investment in CRM over the past 5 years alone. Yet our B2B marketing efforts focus on Trade Ads, Brochures and Mass Mailing; because again, in the terrestrial world it can’t be cost justified to talk to all of your customers & prospects as individuals. (Everyone see where I’m going here?)

The Long Tail of Email Marketing now gives us the ability to leverage unique data with the low cost and reach of integrated email to make it easy for marketers to talk to everyone as if they were the most important customer or prospect on the planet.

Email is being segmented based on every imaginable data attribute from size to industry to sale rep relationship…even to timing of messages. Take a look at your own email program. Are you still using email as “cheap paper” to send newsletters or using your data in combination with email to drive real Long Tail relationships?

Comments

[Gary Bourgeault (thealphamarketer.com)]

This seems to be the huge problem that huge companies being disrupted can't get their finger on.

It is too difficult for them to think of microniches that can be targeted and mined for long periods of time.

They can't see the numberous areas they can tap into and serve underneath the radar. Good thing others can!

[Jonathan Gunson]

This is REALLY interesting for me.

I live far away from the markets, but the internet saved me from having to move countries.

The Long Tail is EVEN MORE interesting and may still become the salvation of certain groups that do not normally make the news - it is a phenomenon that has never been possible in thousands of years of history:

It means that small communities such as relatively unknown ethnic 'craft' groups can make a living at last, because whereas in the past they had too small a group of customers to sell to in their local environment, now, thanks to the internet, tiny groups of buyers that used to be too far apart to reach before, now form a single reachable community.

This liberates many small groups, even here in New Zealand who live far away from the main cities in small towns.

Now they too have a market.

Wonderful.

Jonathan
http://viralalchemy.com
The Secret Of How I Got A Million Hits in 27 Days.