Which year has your email marketing reached?
This is an idealized “big picture” summary of how email marketing is evolved, focusing on targeting. I like the way that the game Civilization summarizes huge sweeps of human technology, so this is done in the same spirit.
The ten generations of email targeting:
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Static Lists (1990). You have a single email list, which customers subscribe to. You send them a text email every week, possibly by copying all their addresses into the BCC field.
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Simple Field Merge (1993). You send a text email, with the customer’s name merged at the top. People think this is really cool.
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Multiple Lists and the Preference Center (1997). Customers can subscribe to several lists, which get emailed at varying intervals. Unsubscribe-by-email doesn’t work so well and the preference center is introduced to let customers, and your admin staff, control who is on what list.
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Analytics (2000) are used for selecting subsets of lists.
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Conditional Content (2003). Customers get the offers most relevant to them, either using script embedded in emails or merge fields sourced from a company CRM system. Integration with Web data becomes important.
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Transactional Emails (2006). There have always been some triggered emails (e.g. to welcome new subscribers) but the marketing potential of these starts to be realized. Near-real-time integration with other channels becomes important.
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Marketing Pressure (2009). Businesses realize the danger of over-mailing and take action to send only the most relevant emails to each customer.
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Machine Learning (2013) and Amazon-like conditional content. Email borrows ideas such as “people like you also bought”.
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Integration with Business Needs (2016). 99% of email is transactional, triggered by a huge range of signals, including adjusting the volume of user responses so the physical parts of business run efficiently.
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Gamified, user-generated content (2020). Email is almost entirely automated. User-generated content is assessed by automatic testing and the best is used for marketing. Email marketing is just another viral channel.
How advanced is your email marketing?
Coda: I basically guestimated up the dates, to illustrate a bigger picture. They are based on my experience of email marketing, and I spaced them fairly evenly to fit the evolution and Civilization game metaphors.
