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Letters: Email marketing fulfils users' needs no longer

Platform: Internet | Author: Steve Morris, CEO, Elertz | Source: NMA magazine | Published: 08.05.08

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Tricia Robinson-Pridemore makes an interesting observation in her sponsor's foreword to your Customer Contact Special (NMA 14.02.08). Organisations do need to regain consumers' trust. But can they when 43% of users believe signing up for emails leads to increases in spam?

It's time for marketers to change their approach, exploring alternative means of communication to reflect consumer demands and, critically, empowering consumers to control the online relationship to rebuild...

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... trust.

New widget technology marks a fundamental step forward from the email marketing model. Users can sign up for the specific information they want and when it becomes available a notification is delivered to their widget, completely bypassing the need for email. Furthermore, communication is instantaneous and guaranteed, enabling organisations to become far more sophisticated and time sensitive with their consumer interaction

This isn't possible with broadcast email because there's no guaranteed timeliness of delivery. Any large-scale communication has to be drip-fed into the system to avoid ISPs' spam filters, which can take anything up to 24 hours. This delay makes time-sensitive offers a rather high-risk plan that can disenfranchise those at the end of the delivery line.

With the shift to consumer rather than publisher power, marketers must be ready to leverage widget technology in order to create a pull-based marketing model. This approach maximises the value of immediate communication, delivers far more targeted and relevant offers to consumers, and consigns junk email to the scrapheap.

From Steve Morris, CEO, Elertz