the reinvention of email marketing

The Relevancy Group LLC

The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing MARKET RESEARCH

The Reinvention of

Email Marketing

and the Future of

Connected Marketing

Discover more at www.therelevancygroup.com (877) 972-6886, [email protected]

Market Research

The Reinvention of Email

Marketing and the Future

June 1, 2010

Volume 1, 2010

of Connected Marketing

Authored by Executive Summary

David Daniels The continued growth of email and digital marketing is creating new opportunities, but marketers are challenged by non-integrated disparate channel-centric technology solutions. Email Service Providers will morph to be recognized as Connected Marketing Service Providers. Email will remain as the hub to social and mobile marketing activities. Given the need to create efficiencies across channels and drive effectiveness through increased sophistication, marketers must calibrate their vendor selection process to reflect emerging marketing certainties to understand the intersection of integration cost and value.

For more information on The Relevancy Group’s services, tailored to the specific needs of your business, visit www.therelevancygroup.com, call (877) 972-6886, email [email protected] or on twitter @emaildaniels Reproduction by any method or unauthorized circulation is strictly prohibited. The Relevancy Group’s reports are intended for the sole use of clients. All opinions and projections are based on The Relevancy Group’s judgment at the time of publication and are subject to change. Published June 1, 2010. © 2010 The Relevancy Group, LLC

The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing

Table of Contents

1 Executive Summary

1 Integrated Email Marketing Empowers Marketers Across Disparate Channels

6 Connected Marketing Service Providers Emerge to Satisfy Shifting Needs

11 Marketers Must Adapt Email and Marketing Messaging Vendor Selection Processes

18 Report Methodology

List of Figures

Figure 1 Connected Marketing Supports the Natural Lifecycle of

Customer Management

Figure 2 Connected Marketing

Figure 3 Connected Marketing Vendor Selection Tool

Published June 1, 2010. © 2010 The Relevancy Group, LLC

The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 1 - Executive Summary

The continued growth of email and digital marketing is creating new opportunities, but marketers are challenged by non-integrated disparate channel-centric technology solutions. Email Service Providers will morph to be recognized as Connected Marketing Service Providers. Email will remain as the hub to social and mobile marketing activities. Given the need to create efficiencies across channels and drive effectiveness through increased sophistication, marketers must calibrate their vendor selection process to reflect emerging marketing certainties to understand the intersection of integration cost and value.

Present Market Landscape Integrated Email Marketing Empowers Marketers Across Disparate Channels

The continued growth of email and digital marketing is creating new opportunities, but marketers are challenged by non-integrated disparate channel-centric technology solutions. Integrated email marketing is necessary to meet the marketer’s growing needs for sophisticated marketing messaging management across channels and disciplines.

Email and Digital Marketing Growth Creates Market Confusion

By all accounts, spending on email, social, mobile and search marketing will continue to grow at a compound rate anywhere from eleven percent to twenty percent over the next five years.i Web analytics is also experiencing high growth as marketers clamor to better understand their clients’ behavior and leverage this data in their retention remarketing efforts. With such fast paced growth and new best practices that emerge everyday, it is becoming increasingly difficult for marketers to understand which vendor categories are best equipped to empower their marketing efforts in a holistic fashion. Why? Because silos and marketing responsibilities within the organization are constantly changing. This reshaping of the marketing buying center is being driven by the following market conditions: - Emerging marketing channels lack dedicated champions and when they do exist

they change rapidly. Today’s marketer is either a jack of all trades and a master of none or they are siloed in discreet functional areas such as email. Pile on emerging social and mobile marketing channels and the once dedicated email marketing specialist is often tasked with managing marketing campaigns across a variety of disparate channels. For those marketers that remain in silos, the team is challenged to do too much in a non-integrated way leaving these functional champions at a loss to optimize cross-channel initiatives that are not integrated. Even in the largest enterprises that have more labor resource than middle market companies, roles and responsibilities can shift often.



- 2 -

The average tenure of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is just 23 months, indicating that even in larger organizations the marketer’s responsibilities will change as often the marketing regime does.ii - Non-marketing functions have become a marketing responsibility. Customer

service is increasingly a function that must coordinate with the marketing organization. The transformation of the role of customer service from that of a cost center to an important client retention function is evident in how Amazon.com has adapted over the last ten years. A decade ago, that company shunned service interaction; their service phone number was not promoted on their web-site. Now the same company spent $888 million to acquire Zappo’s a brand well known for its ability to embrace customer service through emerging channels such as Twitter. Zappo’s is passionate about customer service as a marketing function that falls under the CMO’s responsibility.

- Industry consolidation extends the functionality of every marketing application creating a dizzying array of choice. Over the last two years we have witnessed an unprecedented number of acquisitions and mergers that extend a vendor’s core functionality into another domain. Just in the last six months email marketing vendors have acquired or merged with social marketing solutions, digital asset vendors have extended their reach into the web-analytics marketplace, and offline direct marketing firms have augmented their data businesses by exploiting newer digital marketing components. Such shifts have created artificial categories (i.e. Listening Platforms), recast old nomenclature (i.e. CRM) and redefined the expectation of what marketing analytics means. However, while not dismissing the progress of the expanding marketing eco-system, these changes have served to confuse the end-user marketer as to how to discern the value from the latest ballooning feature race that any one vendor can offer them.

Connected Marketing Supports the Natural Lifecycle of Customer Management A marketer’s ability to cohesively manage subscribers through the four steps of the customer’s lifecycle (acquisition, retention, engagement, advocacy) necessitates an integrated approach to email marketing. In order to optimize a subscriber across the customer lifecycle, consider the need for integration at every step across four independent macro stages. - Acquisition: The ability to measure the effectiveness of a marketer’s acquisition tactics and take the appropriate follow-on action all hinge on the timeliness and quality of the acquisition source and the data that is being generated from it. Whether it is evaluating search engine spending in terms of its ability to grow list size, implementing social marketing acquisition tactics, or qualifying business prospects in a sales force


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 3 -

automation application, the marketer’s ability to achieve success is defined by how tightly integrated these disparate pieces are tethered to their email programs. - Retention: The ability to move prospects to become customers and then report on their spending behavior and discern the appropriate timing for follow-on messages to drive client retention also relies on integration. Our interviews reveal that most all organizations have a dedicated transaction system and database that is separated from their email marketing system. Here again, the marketer’s success can be determined by how easily they can harness buyer data to spur follow-on transactions. - Engagement: Moving a buyer into repeat loyalist buying behavior is a matter of understanding and managing their overall engagement with a brand. The meaning of engagement and the underlying metrics that support it are different for every company. Engagement data and the subsequent measures rely on web-site behavior, email behavior, social behavior as well as non-traditional measures such as customer servicing behavior. As with retention, integration is key to forming a holistic view of the customer’s engagement. - Advocacy: Guiding clients from the engagement stage to become brand advocates is a dream of every marketer. However without the ability to understand client engagement in an integrated fashion and motivate the social sharing advocacy behavior, the marketer will remain stuck in the engagement phase. The advocacy phase closely interrelates to acquisition as successful integrated marketers can understand the cost saving benefits that an army of advocates can have on their acquisition spending. Moving clients across this lifecycle is not an easy task, but as marketer sophistication rises to the challenge it will also overall improve the organization’s ability to be relevant.



Fig. 1 - Connected Marketing Supports the Natural Lifecycle of Customer Management

Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC Email Market Segmentation Is Best Served By Marketer Sophistication, Not Size

Throughout our executive interviews with email marketers, one feature that they desire from all of the vendors that they seek to engage with is integration capabilities. Integration of data, content, reporting and even user privileges are all top of mind with marketers as they seek to create efficiency from legacy systems and processes that are in place. However, outside of the desire for integration, other familiar email marketing features, including deliverability and reporting, universally came up, but there were stark differences once we moved beyond asking about the table-stake features of email marketing management. These differences cut across company size, list size, as well as the markets that they focused on whether that be a business or consumer marketplace. The one clear distinction that grouped these marketers was their current sophistication level as well as their aspiration to be more sophisticated. We encountered many marketers that still see email as a blasting device where list size – not the value or engagement of their subscribers rules the day. However it is the other group of marketers that are much more interested in the value that they can discern from their email program and how that value can be further augmented by integrating it with another channel. Take for example, the following observations - A publisher dependent on advertising sales seeks to integrate their email marketing

application with Salesforce.com so that there is more control put on their sales


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 5 - team to improve the management of their advertising inventory. The publisher

stated they were making this move to improve their mailing frequency controls, in that their legacy situation allows sales representatives to oversell available ad inventory, which in part is leading to over-mailing their house list of subscribers.

- A travel/hospitality company wants to better understand the value of their subscribers that are sharing their email promotions on social networks. Additionally the retailer is seeking to integrate hotel property review data into their email marketing tool in order to target customers who are acting as brand ambassadors. The company plans to test mailing offers to these advocate subscribers to further encourage sharing and viral behavior among them.

- A retailer seeks to understand how they can leverage their web-site analytics data to improve the relevancy of their email marketing offers. Their first project will be to identify those email subscribers that viewed underperforming products but never carted or purchased them. The retailer plans to target these subscribers with deep discounts on this merchandise in order to sell these laggard products at a profit versus the alternative of liquidating them for pennies on the dollar.

The common theme among all of these organizations is email integration. Such an integrated approach to email marketing will change the way in which email technology is classified in the marketplace. Marketers must begin to think with this end-suite goal in mind versus stitching together one-off pieces of the puzzle.


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 6 - Future Market Outlook Connected Marketing Service Providers Emerge to Satisfy Shifting Needs

Email Service Providers will morph to be recognized as Connected Marketing Service Providers. Email will remain as the hub to social and mobile marketing activities, requiring marketers to adapt their email vendor evaluations. Marketers and vendors that adopt a sophisticated and holistic approach to Connected Marketing will be more successful than those that continue to operate in silos.

Email Marketing Vendor Evaluations Will Change to Reflect Market Realities

Given the growing number of digital channels that nearly all marketers are embracing, as well as the overwhelming need for email to be integrated with these channels, the market must adapt the criteria that are used to evaluate vendors. The current market segment name of Email Service Provider (ESP) has become a misnomer as this vendor market segment has morphed to address a number of digital marketing channels. The name of this category will change to a more apt descriptor such as Connected Marketing. This reinvented market segment will be defined by the following vendor attributes: - Marketing Messaging Management: Inclusive of email marketing, these vendors

also have social, mobile and search solutions that allow the marketer to connect in an outbound and inbound manner with their clients and prospects in an integrated manner.

- A Significant Social Offering: More than the ability to share content on social networking sites such as Facebook, these features embody the ability to launch, measure and manage Twitter campaigns, execute social widget applications and identify the social influence of subscribers.

- Analytics and Measurement: Web Analytics are the glue that holds digital marketing together and are necessary to measure customer behavior across both the large computer based browsers as well as the mobile browsers for the small screen. Additionally as new channels and tactics such as social messaging emerge they bring a host of new measures. Marketers must seek tools that can efficiently and effectively deliver a dashboard as well as deep dive analytical tools to empower their decisions. Ultimately, Web Analytics morphs to become more generally Marketing Analytics, a critical component of Connected Marketing systems.

- Segmentation, Testing and Targeting Tools: A common set of tools that can used across any digital marketing channel and applied to search engine marketing, landing page optimization as well as outbound marketing through channels such as email, social and mobile.



- Content Management: Content will forever remain king and is the lifeblood that ultimately drives the notion of relevancy. Moreover, as marketers need to create content in a multitude of formats, inclusive of video, marketers must deeply investigate the content management capabilities of the marketing management provider that they seek to work with.

- Production Management: While the marketing organization has flattened, there are still multiple stakeholders with specific campaign production tasks. The ability to have a solution that allows users to both collaborate and manage tasks on a centralized marketing calendar will become a feature that begins to separate the Connected Marketing solutions.

- Smart Integration: The ability to intelligently integrate with disparate marketing channels, data sources, labor resources and applications is central to the marketer developing efficiencies. Whether the vendor owns the disparate pieces or has tightly-integrated connectors to the parts that embody the whole, these vendors will clearly win out over those that rely on custom programming and labor based solutions to stitch together these elements.

- Best Practice Oriented Services: Every year, effective email marketing continues to become more difficult. Add to that the notion that marketers must become experts at the entire continuum of digital marketing and the customer’s lifecycle requires a vendor that can educate and assist their clients. The need for a vendor with strong strategic and tactical services as well as a effective on-going client education efforts must be prioritized in the marketer’s vendor selection process, even if the marketer initially assumes that all work will be done in-house. Marketers can improve their ROI dramatically by adopting best-practices which often requires additional strategic insight from the prospective vendor. Given the staffing limitations that most organization’s face and the increasing complexity of digital marketing, marketers must prioritize the vendor’s service capabilities in the selection process.


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 8 - Fig. 2 – Connected Marketing

Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC Social Network Communication Will Reinforce Email, Not Replace It

With Facebook growing to over 300 million users in such a short period of time and the rising popularity of Twitter, many have speculated that these new forms of social communication will replace email. Email was the first online social communication tool that empowered consumers to share and connect with their friends and coworkers quickly in a universal manner. The fact that 90% of the online population use email daily and many of whom have more than one email address is evidence that email usage remains strong. Solidifying email’s future is the fact that our email addresses are akin to our digital fingerprint. We need an email address to purchase goods online, conduct online banking and even create social profiles or contribute to online discussions. With the likes of MySpace opening up its closed network to email traffic and the understanding that Facebook has similar plans, these social networks will look more like an ISP or communication portal than the closed network that they now resemble. With every poke, friend request or new follower an email is generated and such social activities have only increased the overall volume of email messages. These volume increases will continue to underscore the need for marketers to integrate social practices into their email tactics and enlist segmentation tactics to breakthrough the ballooning email inbox clutter.


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 9 - Sophisticated Email Marketers Will Be More Relevant, Effective and Successful

Numerous studies have detailed that marketers that employ more segmentation, integrated data and tactics such as testing have higher open, click and conversion metrics than marketers that employ a one-size fits all approach. For example, the use of Web Analytics to target email campaigns improves revenue by nine times more than does the use of broadcast mailings. Despite additional campaign costs, relevant campaigns increase net profits by an average of 18 times more than do broadcast mailings where every subscriber gets the same message.iii Email marketers that employ sophisticated tactics, including connecting email with other channels and data sources will continue to be more effective than those that simply “spray and pray.” Such a need to continually drive the marketer’s sophistication will be necessitated by the growing number of messages in the subscriber’s inbox, increased use of the email marketing channel and the need to create a holistic approach towards digital marketing management in order to drive the efficacy of marketing programs. Email Marketing Vendors That Adapt to a Holistic Approach to Connected Marketing Will Prosper More Than Those That Remain Pure Play ESPs Our interviews with marketers reveal that those changing their ESP often do so because of the inflated costs related to building custom integrated solutions to emerging channels and outside data repositories. Much like Apple’s success with the iPhone and App store, successful email marketing vendors will take a holistic approach to extend email functionality in a repeatable and scalable fashion. Additionally given the continued growth of the marketer’s email list and send size, further email sending price compression is inevitable. Visionary email marketing vendors will off-set this trend by offering a broad array of applications that address the marketers needs across the entire digital marketing continuum and focus on unlocking the true return on investment that is possible with an integrated approach to email marketing. Whether the vendor’s approach is that of acquiring and owning these disparate pieces or delivering them to the market through a tightly integrated approach will be a less important distinction of the vendor’s success. Vendors will be differentiated based on those that address and improve the integration of digital marketing channels from campaign production to analytics with every new product iteration or version release. This emerging crop of Connected Marketing vendors will also be subject to a new array of vendor selection attributes that we encourage marketers to embrace.



- 10 -

Marketers Must Understand the Intersection of Integration Cost and Value Given the overwhelming need to powerfully integrate email marketing into a broad array of channels and data sets, marketers should emphasize the value delivered from these integrations by taking the following into consideration. There are essentially three types of email marketing vendors: 1. Email Only: Those vendors that are solely email marketing tools and offer little or no

integration to other channels, applications and data sources. Working with these vendors will raise marketing costs as the marketer will lack necessary functionality or create work-arounds to stitch multi-channel functionality together.

2. Email Supplemented Through Custom: Vendors that can offer additional channels and functionality but can only do so through custom integration and loose partnerships with additional vendors.

3. Email Tightly Integrated: These vendors offer a true tightly integrated online marketing suite to manage all forms of marketing messaging functionality. These vendors accomplish this through their own native applications or through standardized apps and tight connectors to the disparate functions that embody a digital marketing solution.

Marketers must understand the value of native inherent functionality versus the cost of integrating and acquiring disparate pieces. Email vendors that offer tight integration to other functionality will be at the forefront of the Connected Marketing revolution and will ultimately provide a more satisfying and cost-effective solution for the marketer.



- 11 - Recommendations

Marketers Must Adapt Email and Marketing Messaging Vendor Selection Processes Given the need to create efficiencies across channels and drive effectiveness through increased sophistication, marketers must calibrate their vendor selection process to reflect emerging marketing certainties. Additionally marketers must understand the intersection of integration cost and value to select vendors that can deploy, manage and measure messaging across a variety of digital channels. Email Marketers Must Calibrate Vendor Selection Criteria to Reflect Emerging Market Certainties Considering the evolution of the current market and the expectations for its continued change, marketers must adapt their email marketing vendor selection by mapping it to these three major categories.

1. Channels Served – encompassing the entire digital marketing continuum that is necessary to empower the aforementioned customer lifecycle (figure 1).

Email – the ability to schedule, throttle and manage outbound email marketing and inbound reply handling. This includes segmentation, testing, dynamic content, triggered messaging, transactional message support, a full compliment of deliverability tools and custom reporting.

Social – the ability to extend email’s reach to social networks, launch and manage social marketing campaigns (e.g. Twitter) as well as the ability to measure and analyze subscribers social behavior.

Mobile – the ability to leverage SMS messaging as an email opt-in point and manage outbound campaigns through mobile messaging as well as ensure that email and landing pages render appropriately on small screens.

Web-sites – the ability to deploy and measure micro-sites, landing pages and blogging functionality as well as optimize these pages for search engine marketing placement.

Search – the ability to leverage the relationship between paid search (SEM), as the second-highest ROI form of online marketing, and email marketing in terms of enabling efficient list building and relevancy. Also, the ability for email recipients to share content in emails to the web that is automatically optimized for natural search.


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 12 - 2. Functionality

Usability – while ease of use is placed firmly in the eye of the beholder, marketers must judge usability by the solution’s ability to easily re-use, store and organize mailings, campaigns, data and content. Such an emphasis on re-use and overall usability will create much-needed efficiency for the marketer.

Subscriber Management – the ability to manage not just subscriber data for email, but also additional marketing channels so that markets can understand and manage the interrelation of a subscriber’s channel preference across the entire customer lifecycle. A differentiation in this attribute is the integration of relational data into email databases to allow the marketer to utilize a broad dataset for segmentation and targeting.

Content – often a missing piece of functionality within email marketing applications, the need to augment legacy content management systems will grow as marketers embrace a variety of digital channels. The ability for the vendor to store, manage and organize a host of content attributes and formats are functions where there is a great lack of parity within the marketplace.

Smart Integration – the ability for a vendor to intelligently integrate to common external solutions, such as popular salesforce automation tools and databases must extend beyond a robust application programmable interface and manifest into tight integrations with critical applications.

Analytics – the ability to measure and analyze not only email marketing performance, but all relevant digital marketing channels including web-site measurement. The keys to improving the marketer’s relevance among their subscribers will be found within this piece of functionality.

3. Services

Strategic – the common thread of email marketing over the last decade was that each brought new challenges and our outlook details that the perpetual bar of sophistication will continue to be raised. The importance of a comprehensive methodology of strategic best practices advice and services will continue to grow in importance. Marketers must use the vendor’s capabilities in this regard as a wedge to separate vendors in the selection process even when functionality differences cannot be easily discerned.

Tactical – as important as strategic advice is, it is imperative that prospective vendors can provide the tactical services to lend a hand with


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 13 - the production and management aspects across the digital marketing

spectrum. We consistently find the single reason why marketers that fail to become more sophisticated is because they lack the staffing resources to do so – severely affecting overall marketing ROI.

Support – the relationship that marketers have with their vendors is tempered by the quality of the vendor’s support services. While the cost of message deployment can be commoditized, marketers must recognize the premium associated with satisfying support services. Beyond functionality, we consistently find that the vendor’s inability to delight their clients is the single biggest issue that drives marketers to switch vendors. Pay close attention to service level agreements including up-time as well as response time to support issues.

Successful Vendor Selection Necessitates a New Vendor Evaluation Process

Beyond evaluating email functionality, marketers must adapt their email-only-centric request for proposal processes to an approach that embodies the broadening scope of Connected Marketing. To fully appreciate the critical capabilities of a prospective vendor, we advise marketers to leverage our vendor selection scorecard process. For each one of the capability categories you will assign the following scores based on the vendor’s offerings. +0 If the vendor can only support limited capabilities at an additional cost +1 If the capability is provided within the vendor’s offering at an additional cost +2 If the capability is included within the vendor’s offering at no additional cost -1 If the vendor can facilitate the capability on a custom basis with custom costs -2 If the vendor does not offer this capability At the end of the process, sum the total of these scores and rank the prospective vendors based according to the total score.


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 14 - Channels Served – The following is an example scorecard of how three prospective

vendors might be scored on the channel capabilities.

Capability Defined Vendor A

Vendor B

Vendor C

Email the ability to schedule, throttle and manage outbound email marketing and inbound reply handling. This includes, segmentation, testing, dynamic content, triggered messaging, transactional message support, a full compliment of deliverability tools and custom reporting. 1 2 1

Social Marketing

the ability to extend email’s reach to social networks, launch and manage social marketing campaigns (e.g. Twitter) as well as the ability to measure and analyze subscribers social behavior. 0 2 -1

Mobile the ability to leverage SMS messaging as an email opt-in point and manage outbound campaigns through mobile messaging as well as ensure that email and landing pages render appropriately on small screens. 1 1 0

Web-sites the ability to deploy and measure micro-sites, landing pages and blogging functionality as well as optimize these pages for search engine marketing placement. 1 1 1

Search the ability to leverage the relationship between paid search (SEM) and email marketing in terms of enabling efficient list building and relevancy of emails. Also, the ability for email recipients to share content in emails to the web that is automatically optimized for natural search. 0 1 0

Channels Served Sub-Total 3 7 1


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 15 - Functionality – The following is an example scorecard of how three prospective vendors

might be scored on the functionality capabilities.


Vendor B

Vendor C

Usability the ability to easily re-use, store and organize mailings, campaigns, data and content. This includes a common foldering and search system for subscriber lists, segments, mailings, templates and content 0 2 -1

Subscriber Management

the ability to manage not just subscriber data for email, but also additional marketing channels so that markets can understand and manage the interrelation of a subscribers' channel preference across the entire customer lifecycle. A differentiation in this attribute is the integration of relational data into email databases to allow the marketer to utilize a broad dataset for segmentation and targeting. 1 2 0

Content the ability for the vendor to store, manage and organize a host of content attributes and formats are functions where there is a great lack of parity within the marketplace. -1 2 0

Smart Integration the ability for a vendor to integrate to common external solutions, such as popular salesforce automation tools and databases must extend beyond a robust application programmable interface and manifest into tight integrations with critical applications. 1 2 1

Analytics the ability to measure and analyze not only email marketing performance, but all relevant digital marketing channels including web-site measurement. 0 2 1

Functionality Sub-Total 1 10 1


The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing - 16 - Services – The following is an example scorecard of how three prospective vendors

might be scored on the services capabilities.

Services


Vendor B

Vendor C

Strategic Services

the ability to offer packaged strategic services based on the vendor's own methodology. Seek vendors that have a documented playbook for common needs such as email re-activation and driving social advocacy 0 1 1

Tactical Services

the ability to offer tactical services support on a project or retainer basis. In this attribute the costs are typically additional, score the vendor as a 2 if the services staff has more than 5 years of experience and the vendor has an auditing and training function to monitor and improve their staff. 1 2 2

Support Services the ability to offer 24/7 support via multiple channels. Score the vendor as a 2 if they offer dedicated support staff that are assigned to your account. Typically most vendors will receive a score of 1 on this attribute. 1 2 2

Services Sub-Total 2 5 5

Vendor A

Vendor B

Vendor C

Total Score 6 21 7

In our above example, fictional vendor B clearly wins out over vendors A and C.

Published June 1, 2010. © 2010 The Relevancy Group, LLC The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing

- 17 - Fig. 3 - Connected Marketing Vendor Selection Tool

Source: The Relevancy Group, LLC Connected Marketing Is A Necessary Evolution

We are confident that email will remain as the critical hub of digital marketing activities. Having said this, market forces and the ever-increasing demands on email marketers will force Email Service Providers to become full-fledged Connected Marketing Service Providers. This development will ensure that online marketing in general, and email marketing in particular, continues to demonstrate the highest and most provable ROI of any marketing activity.

Published June 1, 2010. © 2010 The Relevancy Group, LLC The Reinvention of Email Marketing and the Future of Connected Marketing

- 18 - Report Methodology

The core of The Relevancy Group’s products is the perspective and opinion of The Relevancy Group’s professionals. The Relevancy Group is immersed in the industries we cover through ongoing contact with corporate and technology leaders, daily study of trends and events in the online world, as well as our collective professional experience. Individual perspectives are filtered through rigorous collective debate and deliberation, producing research that reflects the combined sensibility of The Relevancy Group’s entire team.

i Forrester Research said in a June 15, 2009 press release that the email marketing sector will “balloon to $2 billion by 2014 — a nearly 11 percent compound annual growth rate.” ii For the past three years, an annual survey conducted by executive-search firm SpencerStuart has shown

that the tenure for CMOs at the top-100 consumer-branded companies has averaged a scant 23 months. iii Email Marketing An Hour A Day – Jeanniey Mullen and David Daniels, Wiley Publishing/Sybex ISBN 978-

0470386736


the reinvention of email marketing

Documents

reinvention of email

marketing responsibilities

search marketing

connected marketing

emerging marketing channels

mobile marketing channels

digital marketing growth

emerging marketing certainties