Marketing Profs

Blog banter and industry experts paint a picture that the toughest email-marketing challenge is something terribly complicated, like inbox deliverability or rendering. The truth? A well-informed marketer, designer, or programmer could solve either of those issues, and most others, between a morning bagel and a lunch-break burger.

Here's the real issue. Most companies are uninformed about email-marketing best practices and suffer from a lack of in-house, expert resources. Very few companies recognize this, however, because even poorly done email still tends to perform fairly well. No harm, no foul, right?

Wrong. On a flight to a recent email marketing conference, I sat next to a woman who runs email marketing programs for a multibillion-dollar consumer products company renowned for its marketing prowess.

For a long time, she had shouldered responsibility for both Web site content and email marketing—until she finally convinced management that each area demanded dedicated staff. Coming from a direct-marketing background, she opted to manage email marketing.

This otherwise savvy marketer knew surprisingly little about some of today's widely published email-marketing best practices—things like how to improve deliverability, how to design emails that render properly, optimum frequency strategies, and how to optimize opt-in pages.

Even her company, which is known for championing marketing and executing brilliant TV campaigns, did not allocate the right amount of resources to the high-ROI email channel. The company could not count on a core group of email gurus knowledgeable and skilled enough to implement commonly accepted best practices.

Such "resource-to-ROI imbalance," as I like to call it, affects the bottom line and brand perception in ways we can no longer afford to ignore.

Why It Pays to Care About the Resource-to-ROI Imbalance

In a February survey by Datran Media, 83 percent of marketers listed email as their most important advertising tactic for 2007—mainly because of its ability to drive incremental revenue.

Have you considered how much money you may be leaving on the table, just by not knowing and not implementing email best practices?