Emerging From a Cold Email Winter
Posted by Bill Leming on March 30th, 2009
Despite significant layoffs, budget cuts, hiring freezes, bonus cuts and all sorts of creative cost-containment measures, more and more clients from many diverse sectors are continuing to experience disappointing earnings. That, in turn, has unfortunately added fuel to even more layoffs; more pay cuts, more unpaid furloughs and fewer perks, not to mention the downward spiraling economic impact in almost all other areas of the economy.
During these first weeks of spring, with all the implications of re-birth and light-over-darkness, it seems appropriate to throw off this depressing mantel of winter and consider what, if any, positive lessons in marketing and, more specifically, email marketing we can take away.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in my post, a two-pronged focus each and every successful CMO I’ve ever met has; namely, how to prove day in and day out that you are generating significant incremental revenues, revenues that you otherwise would not have gotten while simultaneously maximizing efficiency. At the end of the day that’s really all that anyone really cares about. And truth be told people typically don’t care how you’re doing it (so long as it’s legal, ethical and doesn’t include words like derivatives, swaps or interest-only loans.)
So the two most important issues are volume and efficiency. Volume in terms of how many units or incremental units each of your marketing program’s is generating, and efficiency in terms of cost per $1,000 in sales, or whatever ROI metric is most commonly used in your industry and can be accurately measured across all your marketing initiatives.
With so many companies struggling not just to make their budget but also to actually survive, the approach of getting back to basics, to focus on that which we tend to do best is one of the positive lessons that we can all take away. With so many marketers sweating their job security, the lesson is that you’re more likely to be retained and actually promoted if you’re perceived correctly as a highly efficient profit center rather than some misunderstood, complex cost center who’s contribution to profit is either questionable, largely unknown or some combination of the two.
With so many email marketers not segmenting, not testing, not following the industry’s best practices the lesson is that every nickel and every dime within every budget is suddenly of paramount importance and under intense scrutiny. If you’re not segmenting, you’re blasting. And, if you’re blasting you have one and only one program with a single ROI upon which your whole professional career depends. Way too risky for my taste and way too out-of-sync with management’s current need to both increase efficiency, but also with management’s need to do so knowing in advance what they will likely concede in terms of units sold.
Coming out of these dark and cold wintry times it’s hard to imagine a day when management will open up the efficiency purse strings in favor of volume. I assure you that will occur and probably sooner than you think. I also assure you that your ability to provide the right marketing tools needed in the toughest of times is a far better measure of your worth and your value than when it’s easy to do so. It’s springtime in the northern hemisphere and time to change our marketing behavior.
