How Would You Rank Your Organization’s Use of Email Marketing?
Last week, MarketingSherpa’s Anne Holland had the honor of meeting a top email vendor’s Client Advisory Board. Everyone in the room was a head of email marketing from a well known company, including B-to-B and famous consumer brands.
At the start of their meeting the organizers asked each of them to introduce themselves and say how they ranked their organization’s use of email on a scale from 1 to 10. And guess what? No one ranked their company as high as a ’10’. Nor even a 9 or an 8. Most felt they were anywhere from 1-5.
Why were some of the top emailers in the world dissing their own programs? Because we all know what can be done with email, and we’re nowhere near that glory yet…
Everyone around the table agreed that "the challenge is execution" — mainly on the IT & staffing side of email marketing.
I can totally relate to that, especially the staffing part. It’s one thing to say that you should segment your database and send relevant messages to each segment and it’s another to actually go ahead and do it — especially if you’re just one person handling everything from strategy to content to design to send. There’s no way one person can handle all of that. And believe me, I know what I’m talking about…
So how would I rate my organization’s use of email marketing? Hmmm… I’m afraid I can’t give a high rank either. I’d say we’re a 3. Why? Because our email platform is downright pre-historic and we’re not good at best practice sharing among the different teams. My major frustrations are the fact that we can’t do subject line testing or any other testing for that matter (unless we do it manually but remember the staffing issue?), no easy way to do dynamic content, building campaigns takes up too much time, we need to work on deliverability…
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