A survey of the email habits of business people shows that if the email message is irrelevant, a majority will click the SPAM button -- even if the email comes from a known source.
That’s a lesson we all need to understand. When we communicate via email, we have to send relevant targeted information. Simply put, we have to make the email transaction have value for the recipient. This whole area is still evolving but we are definitely seeing a shift from simplistic offers rewarding the buyer personally with trinkets like an iPod, through rewarding the buyer with discounts that benefit the corporation, but are still unsophisticated and about as creative as the limp graphics usually adorning them.
The next category of communication is the most exciting and that’s educating the recipient about how they can do their job more effectively, reduce costs or make more money for their companies with the latest research and benchmarking available. Webinars are a great example and so are a whole range of new ideas like virtual conferences, even newsletters if they’re of the tips and tricks kind. In all cases, you need fresh meat in the form of content based on real world results with insights layered over the top. Everyone turns up for an hour and goes home happy. They took away something new or gained a new perspective. You made an impact because they learned that you are knowledgeable on the subject and therefore they are more likely to trust your firm when they are ready to make a purchase.
The email survey also shows that a majority of business people don’t consider an email to be SPAM if it is from an unrecognized source -- if the message is relevant and well targeted. Now that is really interesting. So relevance trumps permission.
If you’re very targeted and relevant with your email, you have about the same odds even if you’re not using an opt-in list. Why is this? Well, beyond the issue of relevance, I contend we all sign up for so many services, registrations and trials that none of us can remember whose opt-in list we’re on, especially, if that organization then sells access to its opt-in lists, like most online and print publishers do. The tenuous relationships with the trail of websites I leave in my wake as I operate my business is far less important than the value of finding something important to help me continue to navigate the business towards success.
Buying lists is fine. Buying opt-in lists has become meaningless. Remember the CAN SPAM act never mentions the words “opt-in” at all. That’s because CAN SPAM deals specifically with how to conduct opt-out campaigns that are in compliance with the law. There has often been confusion in this area, confising “opt-in” with CAN SPAM. I wonder who pulled off that positioning triumph? Maybe the folks who own the opt-in lists?
Suddenly the world is changing, and there’s a lot more creativity happening. Complacency has just left the building with the last round of lay-offs. Sales and marketing managers and senior management are turning over all the rocks and looking for low cost/high impact ideas to put at the top of their action list. Over the past 3 months, we have noticed a significant swing to outbound email marketing in the Fortune 1000 and specifically in the are of email, several large companies have switched their opt-in email policies in favor of opt-out. Times are too hard for etiquette, especially if we make that communication itself valuable to the recipient.
Does this mean we are going to be seeing more communications sent from vendors? Is your own company talking to more potential customers, trying to counter the negative effects of this economy? Of course the answer is yes to both. The key issue, is that SPAM filters are going to continue to improve to knock out emails that no-one is interested in. Recipients of email -- particularly users of consumer services like yahoo, gmail and hotmail -- are pretty brutal in marking those vendors who bore them as SPAM, thus lowering sender reputations (which can harm your email deliverability rate in the future). Senders will gain good or bad reputations as a result and all the facets of SPAM technology will continue to force email communication in the right direction, into being more and more relevant and useful. The good will survive, the bad will be cast aside.
In the broadest sense, electronic communication in the business to business world is not going away. It will very likely increase over the next 10 years. But the dinosaurs large and small will increasingly find it difficult to survive unless they also adapt into more agile creatures capable of dealing with new business conditions.
