A while back, I wrote two columns dealing with e-mail and segmentation (“Will E-mail Be the Death of RFM?” Jan 26, 2003, and “RFM and E-mail Make for Strange Barfellows” Feb 2, 2003.) While e-mail marketing has changed in the intervening two and a half years, many of my concerns about the lack of impetus to target hold.
My primary fear is the industry perception that increasing e-mail quantities is “free.” Marketers acknowledge an e-mail campaign’s fixed costs, such as creative and broadcasting expenses. But if there is minimal difference between sending out 50,000 and 500,000 messages, there is little incentive for treating e-mail names conservatively.
In fact, marketing executives seem to have incentives to over-mail. Today’s marketing manager can saturate a firm’s e-mail file with offers, receive a bonus for exceeding a sales quota and move on to his next position, either within or outside the firm. This leaves tomorrow’s marketing manager with an exhausted internal e-mail list — to say nothing of an irritated customer base.
Both the industry and regulators have considered collecting nominal fees on a per-message basis as a way of reducing e-mail quantities. While requiring these to be collected at the broadcaster level would have this effect among legitimate mailers, there is no practical way of doing so among irresponsible overseas marketers.
But what if marketing departments had per-message costs levied on them internally by top-level management? The fees would be high enough that no marketing executive could fall into the “incremental e-mail is free,” trap, yet low enough that e-mail would continue to be an inexpensive channel. Alternatively, marketing departments could be given annual maximum quotas of e-mail.
Either way, such structures would force the majority of e-mail marketers to explore segmenting and ranking their e-mail messages. Additionally, if the industry adopted this as an e-mail quantity reduction best practice, it would have a hell of a public relations coup.
Consumer attention is a finite resource. Among traditional mailers, paper costs and postage serve as checks on over-using this resource. E-mail marketing, however, has made it possible for the industry to ignore a basic economic tenet: An item’s value increases in proportion to its scarcity.
Marketers have dumped a lot of the presumptions from the “new economy” of the dot-com years in favor of tried-and-true marketing wisdom. Do marketers hold the idea that consumer attention is infinite, and therefore limitless solicitations will eventually reach their mark? If so, this holdover of dot-com era thinking needs to be tossed onto history’s ash heap as well.
As for the internal cost structure of e-mail: Is this workable or at least worth considering? Let me know.
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact e-mail: rlevey@primediabusiness.com
