Social Email Marketing

When looking back at this week’s earlier post regarding the shift from selling to buying, I remembered an article I wrote a while ago about what I then called ‘the pull customer’.

The marketing and communication reality has changed dramatically since the arrival of new digital media. Whether we call it Web 2.0, social media or any other buzzword, we tend to summarize these changes as the end of mass communication as we knew it, an explosion of new communication channels, the fragmentation of media, the participation of people in the marketing and communication process, customer-centricity, more focus on value and relevance and so on.

One of the changes, that is going on since many years now, is the fact that communication and marketing have increasingly become a ‘pull’ instead of a ‘push’ process. Remember those words? Push versus pull marketing?

For the past few years, the Email Measurement Accuracy Roundtable, sponsored by the Email Experience Council, has been conscientiously working to standardize email metrics.

Standardizing these metrics is crucial in order to improve the quality of reporting and to enhance the creditability of the email industry. As part of the standardization goal, the Roundtable seeks congruent email reporting across existing Email Service Providers.

The email industry operates in a dynamic environment, and, like every major industry, it has its shortcomings. But, one thing that has remained constant over the years is the ambiguity that faces marketers because of differences in how email metrics are calculated from one ESP to another.