Man versus machine in email marketing – is it worth it?

Posted by Spike Email Marketing

“Unfortunately much of the customer engagement software we’re being sold is driven from the marketer’s point of view, not the customer’s, and leaves cigarette burns all over the punters in its wake.”

I love this line in Malcolm Auld’s article on the future of marketing being the same as it was 32 years ago.

It begs you to ask the question, “Are you thinking about your customers?”.

crowd question - Man versus machine in email marketing - is it worth it?

Are you?

Or, are you thinking, “This software will solve all my problems and surely no-one ever got fired for signing up with X company?”

That’s been the common refrain for CTO’s since IBM was the behemoth in the room. But, yeah, they did.

Because X software might have solved a short-term goal – I need to slash my budgets or my managers like pretty pictures. But unless a trained team are running it, it’s never going to live up to all the hype the salesman said it would.

And then it may fail and you, the marketer, will be worse off than you were before because you’ve lost the compounding wins of doing good email. Compounding is your friend. Small wins – a smile, a share or two, a sale or three (online or instore) will keep your customers on your list and your targets met then exceeded.

So, we know it’s an education piece for management – we customise all our reporting for each client. We know people like pretty pictures – so we do heatmaps and have built a dashboard (in Beta). But mostly we know it’s about customer retention and working out how we can personalise your customer’s communications so they talk about you and buy off you.

Nothing is new in marketing. Just the jargon. Keep it simple, and stop burning your customers.

Read the full article here and Contact Us if you’d like a consistent way to stay top of mind with your customers.