There are still companies where e-mail marketing is an almost separate activity. We may deny this, but it’s true. For some businesses sending e-mails has become a kind of routine that is only intended to generate traffic and send marketing messages to lists of addresses that are barely ever followed up on or maintained.

No matter how many studies and reports tell us to take on e-mail marketing differently and no matter how many companies already do this: a lot of companies neglect their e-mail marketing.

This is not only catastrophic for the reputation of the sender but also the cause of many misunderstandings and even criticism regarding e-mail marketing.

E-mail marketing forms a part of a global strategy with interaction, data, follow-up, constant conversion optimization, personalization, segmenting and lead management.

There are facts that no-one can deny:

• There is a shift from selling to buying and e-mail marketing must take place in the purchase process and the lead management process. The focus is not on the sender, but on the wishes of the addressee. And not listening to these wishes is denying the marketing reality.
• Many companies still have a mentality whereby the e-mail marketing campaigns are a type of ‘must’, often even a ‘last minute’ activity. E-mail marketing then becomes the production of some content, broadcasting the mails and looking at how many clicks were generated (if reports are even viewed). That is senseless. What happens before and after the campaigns is just as important as the campaigns themselves.

E-mail marketing in context

All this won’t work without personalization, segmenting and interaction. Naturally some companies still engage in untargeted mass broadcasting techniques. But professional businesses take the trouble to personalize, segment, identify triggers, acquire data, use them for better campaigns, focus more on the recipient, improve the value of the content and define the position of the campaigns in the entire conversion and lead-process.

E-mail marketing must find its place in lead management, cross-selling and up-selling campaigns, customer retention and loyalty programs, acquisition campaigns or any other objective for which there is a strategy and planning, during and after the e-mail campaigns, in a closed loop of constant optimization.

And this must be framed in a holistic and comprehensive marketing context.

This gradually makes professional e-mail marketing and marketing automatism synonyms of each other. All ingredients have to be present in a modern e-mail strategy and a connection with CRM, web analytics, lead scoring and nurturing, the identification of segments is simply a must.

There is also the need for a cross-channel approach whereby the communication needs of the client are central and everything takes place depending on the lifecycle and preferences of target groups.

There are naturally exceptions. A blogger can simply send e-mails with his posts, an online publisher may focus more on traffic (although many improvements are definitely possible in this sector) but for all companies that want to use e-mail marketing professionally, there are few excuses.

J-P De Clerck is a content, conversion and social media consultant. You can connect with him on Twitter or via his site.