Friends, we in email marketing are at a crossroads. We know our email programs give our companies the biggest bang for the marketing buck – an average of $36 earned for every $1 of budget.
We also know our customers – who they are, what they want, and how they shop – and we connect with them in that most personal, private space: the inbox. No other marketing channel can make those same claims.
Despite everything we deliver, though, we’re almost always the most underfunded channel in the marketing mix at our companies. We make miracles happen on the most shoestring budgets – so, the corporate reasoning goes, why spend any more on email than we absolutely have to?
We’re here to help you push for more email budget
That question has frustrated marketers for decades, ever since we discovered how well email helps companies achieve their goals without massive infusions of cash. It always comes up at this time of year, too, as marketers put their budget requests together for the next fiscal year and try to grab a few more forkfuls of the company pie.
A few of us have kicked this question around for years at conferences, in working groups, in online discussions and casual get-togethers. And we know you marketers want an answer, too.
So, we got together recently, turned on the webinar camera, and came up with an hour’s worth of answers and advice to help you make the case for increasing your company’s investment in email. This blog post will share some of the highlights from our conversations. (Get all the details in the full webinar recording.)
Here’s the speaker list for that call:
Scott Cohen, CEO, InboxArmy
Skip Fidura, moderator and fractional CMO
Chris Marriott, Founder/CEO, Email Connect
Kath Pay, Founder/CEO, Holistic Email Marketing
Ryan Phelan (that’s me!), CEO, of RPE Origin
Kara Trivunovic, SVP, Zeta Global
You might recognize some of the names because they’re among the top thought leaders in the email industry. And that’s not just me talking. Three of us – Scott, Kath, and I – have received the Thought Leader of the Year award from the Association of National Advertisers’ Email Excellence Center). And together we represent 136 years of service to email.
Is it our fault?
Partly, yes. Nobody understands what we do, whether it’s executives or colleagues in other departments. They don’t see the value of the data and revenue we can contribute from email. We make it look too easy. If it already works, why spend more?
But, in all transparency, we brought some of it on ourselves, too.
I have been in email for 25-plus years, as an in-the-trenches retail email marketer, as a vendor, and now as an agency owner. I’ve seen the industry move from batch-and-blast list bombing to highly relevant email messages through precise targeting, extensive data use, and significant upskilling – most of it self-taught.
But this progress isn’t uniform. I still see too many marketers emailing like it’s still 1999. This significant lack of innovation in email marketing means we are doing the same things we did 10 years ago.
It’s a vicious circle – we can’t innovate because we don’t have the time, money, skills, or human resources to learn new ways to run a fully evolved email program. But we also don’t effectively show our corporate purse-holders why an investment in innovation is warranted. So, when we do come up with a request, it gets passed over.
Too many of us are complacent about email. Email makes money even when we do it badly. So, why invest the extra time in innovating? Because we make so much more when we do it right.
We need to believe in email innovation before we try to persuade our executives to give us more money to fund that innovation. As our webinar moderator, Skip Fidura, said, “Senior management has never understood the complexity of email marketing and the work that goes into a successful campaign, much less a full email program.”
3 key areas to focus on
This question – how to get more investment in email so you can be more innovative and drive even greater revenue from email – is a big one. We covered a lot more ground in the webinar than I can recap here in a single blog post.
Here, I’ll zero in on a few areas where you can have the greatest impact and show your bosses exactly how a little investment now can yield big benefits later.
Any of these three areas can give you a great start:
- Cross-channel integration
We still need to blow up the silos that isolate marketing channels from each other, especially for the email channel. Email is a connector with data and insights you can apply across other channels. It also can benefit from close integration with your other marketing channels.
Customer data platforms (CDPs), which pull data from multiple sources across your company, have knocked down some of these walls, but we’re a long way away from having CDPs as standard equipment like email platforms.
These three tactics can help you reap benefits from cross-channel integration:
- Integrate your email efforts with other marketing channels like web, social, or direct mail to create a cohesive customer experience and maximize your overall marketing impact.
- Introduce cross-channel attribution models that reveal and measure email’s contribution to the customer journey and overall revenue.
- Collaborate with creative teams to ensure your brand is represented consistently across email and other marketing channels.
- Compliance and best practices
New privacy laws and changing consumer expectations mean you can’t do business as usual, especially if that business had you playing fast and loose with customer data.
These three moves will help you stay on the right side of the law, keep your data clean and reliable, and make your email messages readable and clickable no matter where or how subscribers access them:
- Stay updated on email privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA) and implement robust compliance measures.
- Regularly audit email lists to maintain high deliverability rates and engagement levels.
- Ensure all email templates are mobile-responsive to cater to the growing number of mobile email users.
- Skills and team challenges
Gray-haired email marketers are few and far between. Email marketers tend to be younger, maybe in their first few years of employment. Email is often a stepping stone to other careers, so turnover can be high.
Thought leaders like those on this call often complain about repeating the same lectures on best and worst practices ad nauseam, but many times it’s because the audience keeps changing.
The result is that people leave before they develop the deep skill levels that will help them use email at its highest potential.
These three tactics can help your company recast email marketing to make it more of a career choice than a stop on the way to bigger things:
- Find training to help your in-house email team build skills in email strategy, deliverability, and analytics.
- Identify the unique skills that lead to email success and show executives why those skills – and people who have them – are key to email success and benefit the company.
- Work with senior management to explain why email is more than loading an email into the ESP and pushing “Send.” Your execs must understand why successful email programs require a complex set of resources.
The final step: Speak your executives’ language
After you identify the greatest challenges your email team and program face, you can come up with a plan to address them. I’m leaving that space blank for now your challenges and solutions will be unique to your company. (Plug for RPE Origin here: No matter your business size, RPE Origin can help you audit your email program and processes and develop a plan and business case you can take to your C-suite.) But these two steps can get you closer to your goal.
- Make their concerns your goals
Your execs aren’t down in the email trenches with you. They aren’t interested in high open rates or inbox placement. They want to know how the money you’re asking for will turn into cash for the company.
Show them how your request – a new email platform, a marketing automation suite, more email development, or whatever you have identified as a top priority – will make more money. It could raise revenue, cut costs, bring in or retain more customers, or make your company more competitive. Draw a straight line between the expense of your request and the impact on the bottom line.
- Sponsor lunch-and-learns
We at RPE Origin have had great success doing lunch-and-learn sessions to build relationships within the team and sell up into the C suite. We sponsor sessions across a divisional array of people to teach two things:
- What is the company doing right?
- What should the company think about, and potentially invest in, to unify all the teams and lift email?
Our clients have been incredibly successful in getting the right education across a large company that lacks a centralized system for email.
We just did one on email design, accessibility, and Americans with Disabilities Act compliance. That makes the email practice more visible as the source of how to do email right.
That, in turn, makes email and the email team more visible, for their expertise and their authority in asking for more budget. You can’t just go in and say, “Hey, I want more money.”
You need to present a solid business case and do the hard work of educating your execs and others. But the payoff can be exactly what you want.
Wrapping up
Now for one more challenge: Many innovations that will bring the greatest gains to the company require interdepartmental cooperation. If you have been in the business long enough, you know how that goes. Turf wars erupt, people get defensive, and nobody wants to help the email group.
A cooperative approach will help. Look for an innovative approach that could also solve a problem for your potential adversaries. You’re respecting boundaries but also drawing people together on a common goal.
Yes, all of this takes work. And it might even be too late for this year. But do the work now to find the right projects, build relationships with other departments, and shape your presentation so it helps your executives meet their own goals. How could the C-suite resist funding that?
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