Brand Central Station

Aaron Smith, writing for MediaPosts’s Email Insider, provided an interesting sumary of the most common misconceptions about email marketing.  Aaron is a founder and principal at Smith-Harmon, a design agency focused on email marketing.  (Visit the Smith-Harmon site.)

In these tough economic times, more and more businesses are turning to low-cost marketing tactics that offer potentially high rewards – tactics like email marketing.

The problem, as Aaron points out, is that this potential for a high return on the marketing investment can lead executives to make incorrect assumptions and uninformed business decisions that can have significant (and negative) consequences over time.

Email marketing isn’t exactly like other forms of marketing and common practices for medias like newspaper or television (like increasing impressions by increasing frequency) can backfire.  Aaron outlines the three most common mistakes below:

1. You can increase revenue by increasing frequency with little or no negative consequences. This may be the biggest myth of all. While increasing the number of mailings may result in short-term revenue gains, many program managers are finding out the hard way that sustained increases in frequency result in a number of negative consequences, including:

-          Lower long-term revenue as recipients become less engaged

-          Higher cost of list maintenance and subscriber acquisition as unsubs increase

-          Deliverablity issues as a result of higher spam complaints

-          And worst of all, damage to brand equity

In “View from the Inbox 2008,” a report jointly produced by Merkle and Harris Interactive, 32% of consumers said they stopped doing business with at least one company as a result of poor email practices.

2. Good email creative isn’t different from direct mail or banner ads. While there are certain universal marketing tactics that can be applied equally to email, print and television channels,  consumers engage with email in very specific and measurable ways. It’s possible that taking a print flyer and sending it out as an image-heavy email message may be better than not sending a message at all, but truly effective email creative takes into account factors that make the channel unique. Understanding the limitations of email and the inbox environment like preview panes, disabled images and the nuances of various email readers such as Outlook 2007, is critical to successful messaging.

3. It only takes an hour to prepare and send an email campaign – AKA “how hard can it be?” Yes, and the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus are real. From a marketing perspective, one of the most attractive things about the email channel is the ability to react quickly to shifting marketing goals and turn around campaigns in a short amount of time. And while I have seen truly miraculous turnaround times, effective email campaigns still require strategic and tactical planning, copywriting, designing and coding. Writing effective copy, designing for the inbox environment and coding with an understanding of the many email readers out there are all tasks requiring a high degree of skill and specialized knowledge that only comes with experience. Theoretically you can prep and send a message to your subscribers in under an hour, but odds are it won’t be worth the cost of sending the mailing.

In summary, it’s important to take some time to learn as much as you can about email marketing best practices and consumer preferences (they continue to change) in order to be a “good” client and make smart decisions.  The resulting customer activity and consumer loyalty to your brand could pay dividends for years to come.