Email marketing is becoming a profit-generating channel in its own right, delivering fully trackable and profitable results. Smart companies are no longer approaching email as the poor cousin to all other forms of marketing, instead investing time and money to establish a valuable and rewarding email relationship with their client base.
Sophisticated email campaigns that understand customers’ expectations and then work out how to exceed them have put email back on the map as a valuable marketing tool.
Somewhat surprisingly, it is the smaller, more agile operators who are leading the email revolution. Organisations with less cumbersome infrastructure and fewer organisational problems are cashing in while many bigger players are still coming to grips with the concept.
Many bigger players are starting to recognise the value however, with Manchester United for example hoping to increase their email database from 2 million to 50 million over the next 3 years.
One company who needs no convincing of the value of email as a marketing medium is Amazon.
Amazon, while by no means perfect, are one of the market leaders in email marketing and anyone on the Amazon email list will understand how cleverly targeted and well timed their emails can be.
Their campaigns take into account the purchasing history of the customers as individuals, ensuring that they receive featured products and special offers that are highly relevant and valuable to each of their customers.
Amazon customers who regularly purchase crime/thriller novels are unlikely to find a Jamie Oliver cookbook among the monthly specials in their Amazon e-newsletter. Instead they will receive notification of the latest James Patterson or Ian Rankin release and perhaps a discount on some of the older titles.
The combination of an individually tailored messages and outstanding value propositions is a powerful marketing weapon. As one former Amazon employee put it;
“One thing I learned at Amazon is their deep love of their customers. That resonated with me a lot. Appreciate the people who pay your paychecks and reward them with killer stuff and listen to them when they talk with you. I love that culture.”
Email is dynamic and agile enough to allow marketers to segment their message in ways that traditional marketing has always struggled with. Elegant, agile, dynamic and above all simple email marketing solutions such as the one in place at Amazon are now finding their way into the market on a wider scale as companies strive to set themselves apart from spammers.
