Subject: Bye-Bye, Batch E-mails

From: Chief Marketer <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 04 Jan 2005 08:40:04 -0600

January 4, 2005 | A PRIMEDIA Property |

Table of Contents
E-mail Trends: Bye-Bye, Batch-Mailing
Online Holiday Spending Hits $23.2 Billion
Avoid the Pitfalls of Predictive Modeling
Watching TV and ...

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This Week's Stories
E-mail Trends: Bye-Bye, Batch-Mailing
Flexible mailing frequency, event-driven messages, and the growing importance of the "from" line are among the trends in e-mail marketing that practitioners should be aware of, according to ExactTarget, an Indianapolis-based developer of e-mail marketing solutions.

For instance, "people shouldn't be batch-blasted on a monthly or weekly schedule," Chris Baggott, ExactTarget's chief marketing officer, explains in a release. "That is a relic of print marketing campaigns." Rather, customer requests and behaviors should dictate when to send subscribers an e-mail message.

This thinking ties in with a likely rise in event-driven e-mails. By integrating customer buying behaviors and other data into their e-mail systems and other technology solutions, marketers can almost automate the transmission of event-triggered messages. A customer who purchased a month's supply of dog food, for instance, could be sent an e-mail message reminding him to purchase another bag within a month; if your company is about to offer a promotion on dog accessories, you could send that same customer an e-mail notification of the sale as well. "There's no reason to waste a 'touch' on an entire database when only a few subscribers are interested in receiving a particular message," Baggott says.

Baggott also expects the "from" line of an e-mail to become the most important factor in the success of e-mail programs. Recipients are increasingly deleting messages from unknown senders without even bothering to open them. "We definitely will see more e-mail comping from salespeople, customer service reps, store managers, or franchise owners in 2005 than ever before," he predicts.

Above all, says Baggott, "in 2005 we will see the final and well-deserved demise of batch-and-blast e-mailing, and to some extent the move away from large-batch segmentation."

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Online Holiday Spending Hits $23.2 Billion
PROMO XTRA
Online spending by consumers in the U.S. this holiday season hit $23.2 billion, a 25% jump from $18.5 billion spent online during 2003.

Shoppers spent the most on apparel and clothing ringing up $3.8 billion in sales or 16% of the total dollars spent online, according to the 2004 eSpending Report from Goldman, Sachs & Co., Harris Interactive and Nielsen//NetRatings.

Toys and video games were second with $2.5 billion, or 11% of online revenue. Consumer electronics followed at third with $2.3 billion, or 10% of total sales.

To read more, visit PROMO.

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Avoid the Pitfalls of Predictive Modeling
By Mark Del Franco
CATALOG AGE
It's no secret that many catalogers use historical customer information to create elaborate predictive models. But Scott Nuernberger, lead statistician for Lanham, MD-based database marketing services firm Merkle Direct Marketing, says that without a prior plan to influence customer behavior, all the modeling wizardry in the world will fail.

"A lot of people get caught up in the technology without properly setting up the business problem first," Nuernberger says. Say you have a problem with customer loyalty. "It will do you no good to identify customers about to leave if you have no plan to influence their behavior. Using a predictive model is not enough." But having a plan in place to offer discounts, for instance, to those likely-to-stray customers can enable you to profit from the knowledge generated by the model.

Also be sure that the problem you're fixing can be measured. Response rates and conversion rates are easily measured. But for more-ethereal factors, such as customer satisfaction, you will need to establish metrics, through customer surveys, for instance.

Another pitfall revolves around testing the model. Many times marketers will design a test without considering the necessary sample size to get statistically significant results, Nuernberger says. I you are interested in response rates, he says, it is really the number of responders that determines statistical significance, not the mail volume. So a marketer expecting a 0.1% response rate will need a much larger sample size than a marketer expecting a 5% response rate.

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Watching TV and ...
If you're hoping to get consumers' undivided attention, you might think twice about TV as your medium of choice. According to BIGresearch's latest Simultaneous Media Usage Survey, multitasking Americans are using their time in front of the tube to consume other media as well.

Among the more than 12,000 people surveyed, just about two-third regularly or occasionally read the mail while watching TV. Sixty percent regularly or occasionally go online, 55% read the newspaper, and 52% read magazines.

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