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Are you listening?
The give and take of e-mail marketing campaigns.
Frank Leontis is an experienced marketing manager for a large New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company who has a reputation for experimentation and pushing the marketing envelope. He was one of the first managers to take on the e-business title in 1999, and now in his senior role, he is a regular speaker at e-marketing conferences.
For the first time, Frank is very concerned about his company. Just as the pharmaceutical industry is beginning to seriously rethink the traditional large field sales force model and look for alternative, non-personal channels, he is reviewing data that shows that the average web user receives 70 spam messages a day, 69% of e-mail recipients report e-mail as spam based solely on the subject line and 30% of subscribers change e-mail addresses annually. How can a pharmaceutical product marketing team expect to build a business on such a fickle channel?
Two faces of marketing
Marketing can be separated into two categories: transactional and relational. Transactional marketing is focused on short-term results and looks for low-hanging fruit. Its value is short-lived.
Transactional e-mail marketing can work well as a promotional tool for commodities such as retail (John Grisham's new novel available now for pre-sell on Amazon!) or general broadcast announcements (Register Now for the AMA conference in New Orleans!). It is used for general customer acquisition or as part of an opt-in e-mail newsletter program. These "batch and blast" campaigns think of recipients as numbers used to meet marketing reach and frequency goals. Although there may a rudimentary level of segmentation (specialization, decile), the targeting and messaging are based on aggregated results from focus group market research.
Transactional marketing builds its content from a lowest common denominator approach to reach as many customers as possible instead of creating a targeted message strategy.
Give to get
Relationship marketing is qualitatively different. It is based on the rules of reciprocity, or "give to get," in which there is a two-way and balanced value relationship. Relational e-mail marketing is based on the CRM principles of identify, differentiate, interact and customize. It uses the channel as a way to listen, learn and respond in ways that are both relevant and value driven.
Relationship marketing takes traditional market research as a starting point, but then uses e-mail interactions as opportunities to refine the research at the individual customer level. By using e-mail to ask insightful questions that get to the heart of a customer's need, marketers can sharpen their interactions and focus their messaging.
Every two weeks or so, McKinsey Quarterly sends out a short e-mail to its database of subscribers. The e-mail is about a single business issue, and it invites the subscriber to take a short survey with the promise that all participants will receive the aggregate report within a week. The topics are timely, the surveys are well written, and there is often an additional offer of a recent white paper from their business journal as a thank you.
McKinsey has taken a very progressive approach to its e-mail marketing strategy, using a business survey to create relevance and the promise of timely insight to provide engagement. It is classic relationship marketing, and over the past several years, McKinsey has built rich profiles of its members' interests, perspectives on business and responsiveness to e-mail as a communication channel. The rules of reciprocity are in effect, with both parties receiving value from the ongoing conversation.
Redefining e-mail marketing
To think about e-mail marketing as a market research channel requires rethinking both activities. It means broadening the definition of e-mail marketing and using it more as a social networking tool than as electronic direct marketing. And it means opening up the constraints on valid market research by capturing and analyzing response data from e-mail marketing as a way to improve individual interactions and provide tailored value.
There are three steps to turning an e-mail marketing campaign into a market research channel. In Part 2, I'll describe each of the steps in detail and give you tips on how to sell a relational e-mail marketing campaign in your organization.
A version of this article, entitled "The Self-Fueling Marketing Machine," appeared in the December 2008 issue of Pharmaceutical Executive magazine.