Tink Taylor, Business Development Director of dotMailer responds to the latest National Email Benchmarking report from the Direct Marketing Association

Email elite?

The revelation that email marketing has overtaken print direct mail in terms of volume, according to the latest National Email Benchmarking report from the Direct Marketing Association, published in the Financial Times on Monday (13/08/07), did not really come as a surprise. It does however raise some interesting questions about the future of direct marketing.

The same report also told us that spend on print direct mail continues to increase, in spite of falling volumes, reflecting improved targeting. That is very good news for the direct marketing industry as a whole. But, we need to apply those same principles of improved targeting and quality communication to our email marketing campaigns.

Those who continue to see email as an inexpensive way to get a message in front of large volumes of consumers are missing the point. We should remember that email provides us with an incredibly refined marketing tool, offering vast scope for targeted communications, in a way that has never been possible before.

This message is particularly important as volumes continue to rise at an exponential rate. The industry needs to focus on deliverability and open rates to make sure that their message is actually seen – and acted upon – by consumers. To achieve this, we need to start using the wealth of campaign data that is readily available to email marketers.

By analysing the results of email campaigns in real-time, marketers have the opportunity to understand which customers have opened the email, which links they have clicked on and even which web pages they have viewed as a result. By acting on this data, marketers can precisely target customers in order to motivate the behaviours we want.

Conversely, marketers need to find ways to reach those recipients who have not responded to our emails particularly as these people opted-in to receive the emails in the first place. By drilling down into campaign data we can find out about the previous behavioural preferences of these customers groups – and act upon them.

There are small, but growing email elite, who already understand and are applying these principles and reaping the benefit. Email really does give us an unprecedented opportunity to reach the right people, with the right message, at the right time.