Bill McCloskey of Email Data Source
We’re trying something a bit different today — it’s our first-ever “IMterview,” i.e. an interview conducted entirely via IM (in this case, Facebook IM). We do aspire one day to also branch out into “Twinterviews” (interviews conducted via Twitter) but for now, we will leave those to the professionals.
Our first test willing interview subject was the always affable Bill McCloskey, the Chairman, Co-Founder & Chief Evangelist at Email Data Source. The interview was conducted this past Friday while we were both multitasking, hence I was unable to delve into non-email marketing topics like his love of Jazz and the origin of his disdain for They Might Be Giants. Be sure to press Bill for details on both should you catch him at an upcoming conference.
Now, on to the IMterview…
3:03PM JEFFREY
Bill, welcome to the first-ever SUBSCRIBERS RULE! IMterview!
3:03PM BILL
A pleasure to be here, Jeff. By the way, you guys throw a great party.
3:04PM JEFFREY
Thanks–we try! Could you tell us a bit of what Email Data Source offers marketers?
3:07PM BILL
We are the largest repository and archive of email marketing messages in the world. We monitor the world of email marketing and archive the email marketing efforts of over 25,000 brands and publishers. We have a database of over 11 million marketing campaigns that our clients can access for competitive intelligence, idea generation, affiliate monitoring, brand monitoring, new business pitches, and sales leads. We add nearly a million new campaigns to our database each month.
3:07PM JEFFREY
So that begs the question, how many emails do you personally read each day?
3:09PM BILL
Well, we track nearly 35,000 emails a day. I’d like to say I look at each one, but I do have a business to run. However, when I sit down to write an article, or to comment on the state of the email marketing industry, I have a wealth of information at my finger tips that really gives me a unique insight into what is going on in email marketing today: who is doing it well, and who…well not so well.
3:10PM JEFFREY
If you had to name the top 3 things that folks are doing wrong, what would they be?
3:10PM BILL
1. Ignoring the power of their Welcome Letters.
2. Not making the email marketing channel unique.
3. And finally — and this is hard to believe — not actually sending out a campaign once someone has signed up.
3:12PM JEFFREY
Let’s start on point #1. What opportunities are companies missing in their Welcome Emails after opt-in?
3:14PM BILL
The folks that are doing it right really leverage the power of the Welcome Letter. It is the one email that you are pretty much guaranteed will get opened. And yet, so many people don’t take advantage of that fact.
The good ones use it to begin to establish the brand in the clients mind. They provide special codes for free shipping and special offers. They provide links so that they can begin to segment their list post-sign up. What you don’t to do is to just say “Thanks.” You want to start the engagement from the very first email they receive from you.
3:17PM JEFFREY
What do you think that failure is due to? Is it a failure to understand the email channel? A lack of email marketing education? Cross-team responsibility issues?
3:20PM BILL
You can’t blame it on a lack of marketing education. I’ve seen bad welcome letters from some of the countries most savvy marketers. But I’ve also seen some brilliant examples which I outlined in a recent article I wrote for the DMA.
One of the things I always rail against is that email is often ignored in favor of the latest, unproven, marketing channel. It is fun to talk about the newest whizbang marketing effort your company is leveraging. It gets press and it is something to brag about in the board room. But email just works in its unexciting way. It works. And perhaps, with today’s economic conditions, we are going to get back to being excited by things that just work again.
3:23PM JEFFREY
Let’s dig in on that point a bit. One of the things that works is increasing personalization & relevance by leveraging segmentation – actually personalizing content based on things you know about your subscriber. What percentage of email marketers would you guesstimate are actually segmenting & personalizing their messages?
3:29PM BILL
Well, it is a question that needs some explaining.
Personalization, per se, in the way most people use it - i.e. the inclusion of the person’s name in the email - is okay - a nice touch. But really not all that effective in my mind. You need to do more than just merge a database with an email and put someone’s name at the top to get people to care about your product.
Segmenting by interest, and past behavior, is where the real gold lies, but I don’t think many are taking advantage of that. Way too few anyway. One reason is that many ESP’s don’t provide the proper infrastructure to make it easy (something that ExactTarget on the other hand does make easy - hope you don’t mind the plug). We see some, but not a lot. We should see a lot more, because all the data, especially the data that has been collected by David Daniels of Forrester Research, clearly shows a dramatic increase in ROI when you do spend the time and money to do it right.
3:34PM JEFFREY
So what’s your take on the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy? Is subscriber-centricity the right focus moving forward with email and other one-to-one media like SMS?
3:38PM BILL
What I’ve been preaching, and I think it fits into the SUBSCRIBERS RULE! philosophy is the importance of making people desire to receive your marketing message and you do that by making it exclusive: an insiders club that provides something to the subscribers that they can’t receive any place else.
One of the examples I noted in my recent article was a Harley-Davidson campaign that invited people to sign up for a six-part email series. A mini-series delivered to the inbox that walked you through the various models and financing options. What a great idea to limit the campaign to six emails in order to gain attention! One of the things I’ve been saying is that too much focus has been placed on deliverability, and not enough attention is focused on what you are actually delivering.
3:43PM JEFFREY
So would you say that companies should be invest in better, more personal content to weather this economic storm?
3:45PM BILL
I think you have to be insane not to start investing heavily in one of the least expensive, highest ROI marketing channels on the planet. And that channel is EMAIL. I think you will start to see companies begin to resist unproven channel and start talking a look at the little engine that could — email.
3:46PM JEFFREY
Boy, you know how to stick the landing! With that, I think we’ll wrap things up. Thanks for your time & insight!
3:46PM BILL
Always fun hanging with you big guy! Thanks it was a pleasure.
For more information about Email Data Source and it’s competitive email marketing research tool, Email Analyst, please visit www.emaildatasource.com.
