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!!
