Return to Sender

I won't go into details here but my latest iMedia article revealed one of, if not the number one, biggest issue that I believe email marketing professionals face. That is that most campaigns and the strategy driving them is a one way street. What I mean is that companies spend a great deal of time on the look, the wordsmithing, the offer and other parts of the email messaging but they fail to see the big picture. I could go a lot of different ways with this blog entry but the aspect that I want to address is the glaring absence of a full circle email campaign. The first half of the campaign is the creation and send of the email message.

The second half is the tracking and responses that the sender gets. The tracking goes beyond opens, clicks, ROI etc. Most tools track replies. Where those replies go seems to be another story.

Our informal study found on how companies reply to their email campaigns revealed only 15% of companies that sent opt-in email messages over the span of a week answered subscriber responses to their own emails; 63% failed to reply at all and 15% of the replies immediately bounced as the sender did not have a valid return email address. The remaining 7% of email messages had an automated message that said they did not accept email messages.

To hear me rant some more, check out this brief podcast or press release on this topic.