Top email stories of the past decade? Go figure.
The bright folks at ClickZ are known for having great content on interactive marketing and insightful experts who pen articles for them (sometimes while cleverly pushing their own services/products/agendas) but this one baffles me.
ClickZ Marketing Excellence Awards: The First Decade
It doesn't really say much about how, why or what these awards are for or how the finalists were narrowed down or really anything. So I am confused before I even read the categories and finalists.
The email category is certainly a head scratcher.
They don't spell email the right away (according to EEC's previous mandate) and then list the "candidates."
E-mail
CAN-SPAM legislation
Goodmail
Habeas
Responsys
ReturnPath
Sender Score
VerticalResponse
Am I missing something? This is the best the email industry can offer in the past 10 years? A law and 6 vendors?
Clearly, all of the categories and finalists seem to be phoned in. Search has
Google (overall), Microsoft adCenter and Yahoo! Panama. At least, that makes me feel better. The great strides search has done in the past 10 years and that is all to show?
Anyway, this seems bizarre so my question to you, loyal bloggers, is what are the top things that email marketing has delivered (pun intended) in the past decade?
Surely, we can come up with some items that go beyond infamous law and some vendors.
???
posted by C.E.O. - BrightWave Marketing and EmailStatCenter.com, Author - The Truth About Email Marketing, Columnist, Speaker at 12:50 PM
4 Comments:
Not sure can-spam should qualify for a marketing excellence award. I'd argue it has discouraged excellence by giving legitimacy to the opt-out approach. The others are all sound companies, but it's hard to judge the validity of the awards without knowing more about the criteria.
The first vendor/marketer who came up with the triggered email after shopping cart abandonment? That set the stage for all sorts of trigger email developments.
The first pop-up subscription form? Avoided now, but in its time it was the force behind a lot of rapid list building.
Or the first to use on-the-fly customization to build individual emails for each recipient?
The authentication folk might well prove industry changing...
Ditto certification, but not sure who'd you nominate for that beyond the three vendors already mentioned...
Hotmail? That appeared at a time when getting your own email address was not simple or cheap and encouraged a whole generation to start using email...
And for search, since it covers the last decade, you have to give it to goto.com (who became Overture, now part of Yahoo). If I recall right, they were the first search engine to do pay-per-click and were widely abused at the time for doing so. Who'd want to click on a search listing that was clearly paid for?
Tuesday, August 28, 2007 at 7:37:00 AM EST
Wow - great response Mark. That is why I was hoping to leave the better ideas to people smarter than myself, like you!
PS - great citing of Goto.com! They built the pay per click industry, as you note, and most likely will be forgotten by most in the history of search.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007 at 10:15:00 AM EST
Hang on Simms,
Having started one of the first pure self-service email marketing companies targeting the small business 6.5 years ago, I actually think we should get props for this. Back then no one wanted to touch the SMB space with a 10 foot pole and we stepped out on a limb with a (very) few dollars in our pockets to do it.
We did ask our users to vote for us because of that.
As for other technologies, what about PointCast?
Janine Popick, CEO, VerticalResponse
Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 9:16:00 AM EST
Janine - thanks for the comment. I do believe VerticalResponse deserves props as well as the other vendors on this list. I do not have a problem with the companies nominated - all are leaders in their fields and have done great things for email.
My issue is that I believe email's accomplishments in the past decade go beyond the actual vendors. I see your point on helping further the small business market's adoption of email as a low cost communications tool and that should be applauded.
What is really impressive is that you have a loyal client base that truly support you and voted for VR. That is impressive!
I am just hoping we as an industry can point out some other items that we have collectively achieved as a whole.
So I think you have correctly added one to the list : small business usage of email marketing.
Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 9:25:00 AM EST
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