The New Goal for 2010: Value

Any email marketing blog worth its salt promotes relevance and timeliness as the ideal goals for email marketing; we here at Bronto have been saying this for years.  But like anything related to marketing, we have to evolve with the times. Dela Quist has recently started a movement to promote value over relevance and timeliness – watch his short video explaining this concept here.

Essentially what he’s saying is that you can be as timely and relevant as possible, but if your message has no value, it’s missing the mark.  As he says, “Relevance is the cart and not the horse. Without value (significant and demonstrable) you may be on topic, but you cannot be relevant. So, do your email campaigns give value (a fair return or equivalent in goods, services, or money) or are they merely on topic?”

Dela has a great point we email marketers should take to heart. You can do your best to hit the timely and relevant mark through segmentation, affinity marketing, and behavioral triggers, but if your offer is not valuable, is it really compelling? So many retailers promote existing sales on their website via email… if your subscribers could get the same discount just by going directly to your site, what value is your email providing them, besides a reminder that said discount exists?

I don’t believe one should completely cast aside timeliness and relevance as email marketing goals, but I do agree that value should be the #1 goal ahead of them.  Timeliness has its importance – seasonality, customer lifecycles, time-sensitive offers, etc.  Relevance is obviously important – e.g.  J. Crew emailing me (a single and childless subscriber) their kids’ clothing promotions is a waste of their marketing dollars and a risk that I will unsubscribe from their regular women’s marketing emails. But you can’t be everything to everyone – it’s rare that a marketer has interest or preference data on every single subscriber in their house file.  So while relevance should still be a goal, the value of your message is more important.

What matters is your conversion rate, right? How effective was your message, how many people purchased, downloaded your whitepaper, or registered for your event? Opens and clicks are less relevant by default. I’m never going to open or click on J. Crew’s kids’ promos. Likewise, a consumer is not going to open a message with a subject line that promotes a product they have no interest in. Additionally, if you are promoting the same old 10, 15, 20% off sale they see in their inbox every other month from you, it loses value and they are trained to just wait for the next email promo when they want to buy. Check out Mark Brownlow’s eye-opening post on “the email that cried wolf” to further underscore this point.

So for 2010, I challenge you to re-evaluate your email program – does it add value for your subscribers?  Do they get exclusive offers, discounts or content that one can’t get elsewhere, or by just going to your site? “Email club” or VIP-type discounts and perks, birthday coupons or exclusive content are great ways to set your marketing apart from the rest, and give your customers real value.  Customers who see value will convert at a higher rate, and be more likely to stay subscribed and tell their friends – it’s a win/win!  Use A/B tests with different offers to find what your subscribers respond to most: dollars off versus percentage off sales, tiered offers (e.g. “spend $50, get 10% off; spend $75, get 15% off,”) versus a flat discount, and free shipping versus a percentage off are great tests to try. You may find that perceived value is different than actual value, and that it works to your bottom line’s benefit.

Julie Waite
Email Marketing Strategist at Bronto