The Pontiflex Blog

Breaking Email Out of the DM Ghetto

February 4, 2011 at 2:23 pm Jordan Cohen 1 comment

I had the honor of speaking at two big annual email marketing events in the past 2 weeks: First, at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Las Vegas, and then again earlier this week at the DMA’s annual Email Evolution Conference in Miami, Florida.  Both of the panels I sat on focused on digital marketing integration best practices, with the former squarely focused on email-social media integration.

One concept that I was happy to get the chance to touch on was the need for email marketers to break out of the “direct response ghetto.”  I argued that practitioners’ “buy now, buy now” mentality hampers the entire industry’s ability to capture the imagination of the C-suite.

CEOs love spending billions of dollars on Superbowl ads because they are fun, creative, and downright sexy. On the other hand, a never-ending series of “20% off if you buy now” coupons jammed into peoples’ inboxes is far from inspiring.

Like I told attendees at both events–social media is the salvation of email marketing. Here’s why:

1. The people on the hook for social media marketing success are often the same people responsible for email marketing success (as was the case at Sherpa with my co-panelists from Threadless and Freshpair);
2. Marketers get props for growing their social media presence regardless of whether they can quantify any hard sales from the channel. With social media, the C-suite gets that there is intrinsic value in having a large audience of identifiable individuals to communicate with;
3. We can easily make the case to transfer that currency to email lists… We can and should rightfully argue that having a large list of email subscribers has just as much intrinsic value in and of itself, regardless of whether people buy in direct response to email marketing messages or engage with marketers’ brands in other ways (e.g., advocate brands to their friends and families)… And finally;
4. Social media is “humanizing” email marketers… it is teaching marketers how to incorporate personas into their brands, and infuse all their messaging–email included–with personality and charisma. The email marketing leaders of tomorrow are using email to drive engagement with, and conversations about, their brands–not just immediate sales–and the only way to do that is to get creative, to be inspiring, and to give recipients something fun to do…

Once we capture the imaginations of the masses through email, capturing the C-suite’s will quickly follow. So forget everything you thought you knew… Leave the calculator at home… And for crying out loud stop analyzing everything to death… Tear down the walls that are holding you back and inject Superbowl-level thinking into your email marketing program.

Jordan Cohen

VP, Business Development

Pontiflex

Entry filed under: Email, Events, Industry Thought Leader, Social Marketing. Tags: .