Everything Old is New Again

On his blog the other day, Chris Baggott of ExactTarget talked about the benefits of email marketing in terms of reaching long tail customers - those that might not be your biggest customers, but whose aggregate purchases are significant:

The Long Tail of Email Marketing now gives us the ability to leverage unique data with the low cost and reach of integrated email to make it easy for marketers to talk to everyone as if they were the most important customer or prospect on the planet.

Email is being segmented based on every imaginable data attribute from size to industry to sale rep relationship…even to timing of messages. Take a look at your own email program. Are you still using email as “cheap paper” to send newsletters or using your data in combination with email to drive real Long Tail relationships?

Chris is right, and I'm not knocking him here - but I had to chuckle when I read this. Because what Chris is talking about is exactly what Seth Godin talked about as the promise of email marketing - in 1999.

Godin coined the term "permission marketing" and talked at length about how email made it possible for marketing messages to be highly relevant to customers. Most marketers ignored the "relevant" part and looked at email as "cheap paper," to use Chris's term. (They also generally interpreted "permission" to mean "you didn't scream at me so I can bombard you with messages" or "you didn't catch me when I tricked you into 'opting-in' on a web form," but that's another story.)

The result - the hurdles are higher than they ought to be for today's email marketers, because consumers are used to getting tons of junk in their inb0x (even from companies they know). Still, it's nice to see marketers finally getting back to the original idea of how email could make marketing more efficient for us and more useful for our audiences.