Seattle Direct Marketing Association

Still reeling from last month's Market to the Max extravaganza, and all the great info I gleaned from those sessions, this month's Seattle Direct Marketing Association event was another stellar presentation.

Representatives from companies such as Classmates.com, Expedia and others, who rely heavily on successful email marketing campaigns, formed a panel to tell us about current trends, past experiences and thoughts about future directions of direct email marketing. 

The most compelling bit of info for me was the wide range of tracking, measuring tools and methods used by the different companies.  One company fastidiously tracks their direct email marketing success by looking at data on open rates, click throughs, and unsubscribes, etc.  What I would call, the good ol' core of direct email marketing metrics. 

While another company (with very successful email marketing campaigns) completely ignores all of this info and instead tracks only revenue from each campaign. Period. Of course they also look at opt-outs to calculate future dollars lost from potential transactions from these customers, using some very fancy modeling, I'm sure.

Then, to the other extreme, was the company that doesn't look at any direct email campaign metrics, and pretty much just keeps sending email to anyone and everyone until they unsubscribe.  That's another way to do it!

Also of interest was the topic of subject lines.  Many a brow has spent furrowed hours vexing over the best subject lines, and poring over data from multi-variate testing.  However, it seems that much of the old thoughts on subject lines can be tossed out the window.  What direct email marketers are finding is that while short subject lines, the holy mantra of email marketing, may get more opens, ultimately they have no bearing on sales.  In fact, longer subject lines are often found to generate more revenue per campaign.  Even with lower open rates.

The bottom line result of listening to the event panel is that technical issues will work themselves out, but all direct email marketers need to be testing and tracking results. 

Whether you are considering including animation in your direct email marketing, long stories, short stories, or special offers, every direct marketer should learn their own audience and track everything until you know what you need to be looking at.  Define your goals... and test, test, test!