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 coming 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.”