Good day for Relationship Marketing

Why is it a good day?   Because I opened my email this morning to two great articles:  One from Email Insider from MediaPost and one from Forrester (subscription required)

The following are direct quotes:

Personality Goes A Long Way Posted May 10th, 2007 by Chad White 

 

"I’ve been reading Chris Baggott’s newly released book Email Marketing By the Numbers: How to Use the World’s Greatest Marketing Tool to Take Any Organization to the Next Level, and one of the things that got me thinking was the advice “Be human.” Chris says, “People don’t fall in love with institutions… Your chance of landing in a great relationship increases exponentially when you show a human side.”

With that in mind, I decided to see how retailers do when it comes to injecting humanity into their emails.....

Okay, so how human are retailers? Not very. By my estimation, about one in six major online retailers tracked via RetailEmail.Blogspot regularly has a person with a name telling subscribers something. That was my threshold for being human — the person needed to have a name that was mentioned in the email. So models don’t count, and copy that sounds very conversational doesn’t count, either.

There’s an even smaller group of retailers that almost always has a human voice in its emails. That group consists of the Sportsman’s Guide, which always carries a folksy message from Gary Olen, the founder of The Sportsman’s Guide; TigerDirect, whose emails are signed by Carl Fiorentino, the very enthusiastic president of TigerDirect.com; and Crutchfield, whose emails are signed by Bill Crutchfield and regularly feature pictures of staff members with products.... Read the entire post here

So Follow that up with a new report by Forrester analyst Mary Beth Kemp.  The title of the paper is "What the Long Tail Does For Relationship Marketing"  Now you need to be a client of Forrester to read this report, but hopefully they won't sue me for clipping one germain item:

....Although email marketing is embraced by 93% of marketers, emails are still not up to standards. In Forrester's annual review of email programs only one of the 63 reviewed passed our test, mostly due to lack of customer centricity. 

Generic blasts of email newsletters, too often the online relationship marketing silver bullet, are not dialogue-building tools. Nor is simply substituting emails for direct mail the right approach. Forrester recommends building email conversations to guide customers through the consideration and purchase cycles. Relationship marketers can use their data skills to understand how and which consumers are using social media and in which way — and then tailor tactics for reaching them.

Gold Jerry, Gold!!

Comments

[Sivaraman Swaminathan]

Thanks Chris for your lovely comments on my blog. The key I presume, is email marketing for brands must move to a level where it becomes a personal message from a friend rather than act like a pickpocket trying to steal from your wallet. Most email marketing campaigns are stuck there I guess.

[MM]

i dont personally mind generic blasts as long as it is for something i am interested in and from someone i am interested in buying from. For example, i recently bought a basketball jersey online. the nba started sending me emails telling me when products of my favorite team (which they asked me during the process) and player (the one whose jersey i bought) were on sale. although every miami heat fan got the same e mail as me, it was targeted enough that i looked at it and did not mind it, but actually felt thankful that i might be able to get a good deal on something i liked.

i think as long as the e mail is targeted enough , it is acceptable and even useful to the consumer.

here is a site with some good insight on the topic

http://www.advertisingonlinesite.com/Email_Marketing.html

[terra]

This is all very true! When you can see a face and/or a personality behind a brand, it makes it all the more enticing!

[Scott Burkey]

One of the things I've seen for awhile now is that email marketers will either be personal in their From address, Subject Line or Content but not in all three consistently. I think that receiving an email from an EFFECTIVE email marketer is that it looks and reads like it's from a trusted friend. Great article & thanks for the follow-up Comments everybody.

[EmailMarketingEZ]

There are some shining examples of "personal" emails coming from the IM Gurus. It's interesting, because even though I know that they are communicating with me using a formula . . . it still seems to work in building trust!

Weird.