Don’t Forget About Email, And Do It Better

By Matt Blumberg
CEO & Chairman

Over the holiday weekend Fred Wilson, venture capitalist and prominent tech blogger, had a great post titled “Don’t Forget About Email.” As a proponent of all kinds of new messaging services, Fred’s post serves to remind marketers that while hot new technologies like Twitter are great, they don’t replace the need for smart, well-executed email marketing. [Disclosure: Fred is an investor in both Twitter and Return Path.] He gives some examples of emails that he especially likes from Hype Machine and Etsy.

I’m sure you’re not surprised that we at Return Path agree that email is important. But what I think is really important for marketers to think about NOW is that the “batch and blast” strategy is really and truly dying. Sending one kind of email to millions of people is just not a recipe for success in 2009. As Fred writes, the Hype Machine email is cool because “It’s a customized auto generated email that is different for every member.”

Are you sending one email to everyone on your list? If you are, now is the time to think about what segmentation would look like for your business and what your customers and prospects really want from email. If your email response rates are eroding it is not going to help you to jump to the next hot new technology. Thinking about how your can better serve your customers — through whatever platform makes sense — is going to take you farther, faster.