E-mail Marketing - why you'll need to sort it out very soon

Ashley Friedlein Staff
CEO at Econsultancy

09 February 2006 11:15am

My sense is that over the last few years a lot of people have been talking about best practices in e-mail marketing but that not that many companies have truly been embracing them.
I know that at our roundtables, training and other events, we have repeatedly discussed best practice within e-mail marketing. Things like:
- Quality content (not repurposed brochureware)
- Permission marketing
- Integration with direct mail and other forms of marketing
- Segmentation and personalisation
- Triggered e-mail events
- Frequency capping / contact strategy definition
- Measurement and tracking
- etc. etc.
I also know that we ourselves don't practice what we preach as much as we would like. But now, having relaunched our site, properly addressing our e-mail marketing strategy and execution is very high on our priorities.
I wonder whether this is true for other companies out there? Are you finally getting round to doing e-mail marketing properly...? My sense is that this is indeed the case.
There are a number of important drivers:
1. Finally there is some time... A lot of large sites have been going through their second, third or fourth design iterations over the last years. Largely this has been in response to usability and accessibility challenges. Companies have been seeking to address the quality of the user experience on their sites, as well as addressing potential legal liabilities. Now that many companies have come through this, e-mail is a next high priority.
2.It looks like you're going to have to pay to send e-mails. Whichever direction you look it seems almost inevitable that commercial e-mail senders will, in effect, be paying to send e-mails:
- Look at Dave Chaffey's post about AOL and Yahoo! charging for e-mail postage via Goodmail
- Look at my post about us feeling forced into the Bonded Sender program to acheive Hotmail deliverability.
So, if you're going to have to pay to send e-mails, it's really time you made sure you were only sending e-mails that are worth sending.
3.A realisation that e-mail really does drive sales / value. You can spend a lot of time sweating blood and money trying to shift your online conversion rate by a percentage point or so. Once you've fixed the obvious mistakes it becomes increasingly hard to make step changes.
And all the time you're happily blasting out e-mails which seem to be doing the trick in driving sales. If it it isn't broken, why fix it? But when you start to look at e-mail properly you realise not only are there huge opportunities there to deliver further value, but there is also certainly the opportunity to destroy the goose that is laying your golden eggs.
4. Once they're gone, they're really gone. You become all the most acutely aware of the importance of point 3 (i.e. the danger of destroying the relationship you have with existing e-mail customers) when you realise:
- That once they unsubscribe you might not have any legal way (in the UK at least) of recontacting them if you don't have other details (postal). They're gone.
- That other channels of communication are fast closing down so you'll become more reliant on permission-based e-mail contact. In particular, the phone (and telesales) is becoming tough. In the UK there are now 11m people on the Telephone Preference Service and the figure is soaring. There are over 0.5m people on the Corporate Telephone Preference Service and large companies are block-adding their entire employee lists.
Just recently in Italy the government changed the law so that anyone in the telephone book had to ring up to opt-in to telemarketing calls. If they didn't do that then it was assumed that they had opted-out and you could not call them. 80,000 people opted-in for calls. It's destroyed the telemarketing industry in Italy. But I imagine it's made people take a much harder look at their e-mail relationships?
Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com
David Hughes
Strategic Consultant at Non-line Marketing

09 February 2006 14:40pm

Interesting post, Ashley
As a sad old hand of the email marketing world I feel that a lot of people (me included) have been standing on our soap boxes and talking about these issues since about 1998. As you say, maybe the only thing that is different is that people have the time and commitment to take email seroiusly.
I remember the issue of ISP's making marketers cough up for delivery appeared on my radar back in 1998. All the excitement was about "portals" as media owners and to some extent that has come to pass, except it's the ISP's rather than the sites that have won the battle as the gatekeepers.
Jupiter back in 1999 were talking about the spectre of delivery premiums for reaching somebody's "primary in-box" with everything else consigned to a lower order file. Even talk of folders with Nike swooshes or McDonalds Golden Arches would give a branding benefit to buying delivery. This was a media owner model, and its taken a healthy diet of Spam to get the market thinking about the same model but for delivery, not circulation.
As for the techniques, I remember e2 Communications (parent of Bluestreak) talking about "Adaptive Sequence Messaging" for event driven or trigger-date emailing. I tested email teasers to dirve direct mail pack response back in 1999 as a way of email supporting other channels. Segmentation has been going on in email for pretty much as long as the medium has been around, and some companies applied what they were doing with laser print personalisation to their email activity back at the end of the last millenium.
Finally, re-read Permission Marketing, Seth Godin's tome from the last century and see how closely that mirror's today's best practice.
Big wins for anybody who can dig out their plans from 2000 and impement them in 2006?
David
On 11:15:29 9 February 2006 Ashley wrote:

My sense is that over the last few years a lot of people have been talking about best practices in e-mail marketing but that not that many companies have truly been embracing them.

I know that at our roundtables, training and other events, we have repeatedly discussed best practice within e-mail marketing. Things like:

- Quality content (not repurposed brochureware)
- Permission marketing
- Integration with direct mail and other forms of marketing
- Segmentation and personalisation
- Triggered e-mail events
- Frequency capping / contact strategy definition
- Measurement and tracking
- etc. etc.

I also know that we ourselves don't practice what we preach as much as we would like. But now, having relaunched our site, properly addressing our e-mail marketing strategy and execution is very high on our priorities.

I wonder whether this is true for other companies out there? Are you finally getting round to doing e-mail marketing properly...? My sense is that this is indeed the case.

There are a number of important drivers:

1. Finally there is some time... A lot of large sites have been going through their second, third or fourth design iterations over the last years. Largely this has been in response to usability and accessibility challenges. Companies have been seeking to address the quality of the user experience on their sites, as well as addressing potential legal liabilities. Now that many companies have come through this, e-mail is a next high priority.

2.It looks like you're going to have to pay to send e-mails. Whichever direction you look it seems almost inevitable that commercial e-mail senders will, in effect, be paying to send e-mails:
- Look at Dave Chaffey's post about AOL and Yahoo! charging for e-mail postage via Goodmail
- Look at my post about us feeling forced into the Bonded Sender program to acheive Hotmail deliverability.
So, if you're going to have to pay to send e-mails, it's really time you made sure you were only sending e-mails that are worth sending.

3.A realisation that e-mail really does drive sales / value. You can spend a lot of time sweating blood and money trying to shift your online conversion rate by a percentage point or so. Once you've fixed the obvious mistakes it becomes increasingly hard to make step changes.

And all the time you're happily blasting out e-mails which seem to be doing the trick in driving sales. If it it isn't broken, why fix it? But when you start to look at e-mail properly you realise not only are there huge opportunities there to deliver further value, but there is also certainly the opportunity to destroy the goose that is laying your golden eggs.

4. Once they're gone, they're really gone. You become all the most acutely aware of the importance of point 3 (i.e. the danger of destroying the relationship you have with existing e-mail customers) when you realise:
- That once they unsubscribe you might not have any legal way (in the UK at least) of recontacting them if you don't have other details (postal). They're gone.
- That other channels of communication are fast closing down so you'll become more reliant on permission-based e-mail contact. In particular, the phone (and telesales) is becoming tough. In the UK there are now 11m people on the Telephone Preference Service and the figure is soaring. There are over 0.5m people on the Corporate Telephone Preference Service and large companies are block-adding their entire employee lists.

Just recently in Italy the government changed the law so that anyone in the telephone book had to ring up to opt-in to telemarketing calls. If they didn't do that then it was assumed that they had opted-out and you could not call them. 80,000 people opted-in for calls. It's destroyed the telemarketing industry in Italy. But I imagine it's made people take a much harder look at their e-mail relationships?

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com
Peter Duffy
Business Development Director at e-Dialog

10 February 2006 07:43am

All great points Ashley :) Across our clients we see e-mail accounting for at least 20 percent of interactive revenues, which highlights the importance of the channel.
Consumers now expect one-to-one communication: behavioural targetting, lifecycle messaging, personalised tranactional messaging and multi-channel integration are now must-haves for brand leaders.
I hope we'll have the chance to talk more about this at the e-mail showcase next week.
Kind regards
Peter
On 11:15:29 9 February 2006 Ashley wrote:

My sense is that over the last few years a lot of people have been talking about best practices in e-mail marketing but that not that many companies have truly been embracing them.

I know that at our roundtables, training and other events, we have repeatedly discussed best practice within e-mail marketing. Things like:

- Quality content (not repurposed brochureware)
- Permission marketing
- Integration with direct mail and other forms of marketing
- Segmentation and personalisation
- Triggered e-mail events
- Frequency capping / contact strategy definition
- Measurement and tracking
- etc. etc.

I also know that we ourselves don't practice what we preach as much as we would like. But now, having relaunched our site, properly addressing our e-mail marketing strategy and execution is very high on our priorities.

I wonder whether this is true for other companies out there? Are you finally getting round to doing e-mail marketing properly...? My sense is that this is indeed the case.

There are a number of important drivers:

1. Finally there is some time... A lot of large sites have been going through their second, third or fourth design iterations over the last years. Largely this has been in response to usability and accessibility challenges. Companies have been seeking to address the quality of the user experience on their sites, as well as addressing potential legal liabilities. Now that many companies have come through this, e-mail is a next high priority.

2.It looks like you're going to have to pay to send e-mails. Whichever direction you look it seems almost inevitable that commercial e-mail senders will, in effect, be paying to send e-mails:
- Look at Dave Chaffey's post about AOL and Yahoo! charging for e-mail postage via Goodmail
- Look at my post about us feeling forced into the Bonded Sender program to acheive Hotmail deliverability.
So, if you're going to have to pay to send e-mails, it's really time you made sure you were only sending e-mails that are worth sending.

3.A realisation that e-mail really does drive sales / value. You can spend a lot of time sweating blood and money trying to shift your online conversion rate by a percentage point or so. Once you've fixed the obvious mistakes it becomes increasingly hard to make step changes.

And all the time you're happily blasting out e-mails which seem to be doing the trick in driving sales. If it it isn't broken, why fix it? But when you start to look at e-mail properly you realise not only are there huge opportunities there to deliver further value, but there is also certainly the opportunity to destroy the goose that is laying your golden eggs.

4. Once they're gone, they're really gone. You become all the most acutely aware of the importance of point 3 (i.e. the danger of destroying the relationship you have with existing e-mail customers) when you realise:
- That once they unsubscribe you might not have any legal way (in the UK at least) of recontacting them if you don't have other details (postal). They're gone.
- That other channels of communication are fast closing down so you'll become more reliant on permission-based e-mail contact. In particular, the phone (and telesales) is becoming tough. In the UK there are now 11m people on the Telephone Preference Service and the figure is soaring. There are over 0.5m people on the Corporate Telephone Preference Service and large companies are block-adding their entire employee lists.

Just recently in Italy the government changed the law so that anyone in the telephone book had to ring up to opt-in to telemarketing calls. If they didn't do that then it was assumed that they had opted-out and you could not call them. 80,000 people opted-in for calls. It's destroyed the telemarketing industry in Italy. But I imagine it's made people take a much harder look at their e-mail relationships?

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com
Mike Weston Gold
Managing Director at Profusion

10 February 2006 11:15am

I’ve got a slightly broader view on this topic: I don’t think it’s just email – not even just digital marketing, but rather the importance of customer communication generally.

The cost of acquisition is getting higher, both online and offline. This is being driven by a number of factors, including:
• more marketers vying for customers’ attention;
• more channels for marketers to shout at those customers;
• media inflation means we’re having to pay more to reach smaller audiences (online and offline);
• tighter rules and message fatigue is making it harder to get customers to listen.
All of this makes it increasingly attractive for marketers to improve their share of wallet with customers they already know because it’s easier to get their attention and the costs can be significantly lower (even with paid-for email delivery): in other words to look at retention marketing more and more seriously.
This is backed up by a Pitney Bowes’ survey of marketing professionals from over 1000 companies, released late last year, which said 53% of all marketing budgets are now spent on retention rather than acquisition.
So how do you talk to someone you know? Whichever channel you use, the answer is carefully: the relevance of your message becomes hugely important… and as we sit here in 2006 (perhaps unlike the late ‘90s when we were seduced by the dream of one-to-one marketing) the technology on offer does allow for a huge increase in relevance.
So are marketers “getting round to doing email marketing properly”? Yes, I believe increasing numbers are – in fact I can name several that do, and not just from my own customer list. These are the marketers who listen to the feedback they receive, directly and indirectly, to the messages they send out; who only talk to customers because they have something the customer wants to hear, not because they want to tell them something. They base their personalised content on real information (both declared and observed), not just assumptions based on age and postcode.
These are the marketers who, in 2006 and beyond, will reap the benefits of excellence, not just in email marketing, but customer communication. I hope to meet more such marketers at your email marketing round table event in April, Ashley.
Ashley Friedlein Staff
CEO at Econsultancy

28 February 2006 10:23am

As mentioned in my original post we (E-consultancy.com) are looking at our own e-mail marketing strategy and approach at the moment.
There seem to be two camps appearing with split views on what might work best for us.
Three people (e-mail marketing service providers or consultants) that I've talked to, and whose views I respect, focus very much on the newsletter as the main vehicle for driving value both for the user and for us. So it is about improving the newsletter through increased personalisation of content, very fine levels of testing and tweaking in terms of design and layout etc. This is the weekly E-busines Briefing newsletter that we send to around 20,000 opted-in subscribers each week.
To me this is the 'fat lunch' approach - trying to make that single, important, piece of communication so wonderfully appetising that readers will look forward to it every week, open and respond to it, and pass it on to their friends. Of course, it is expensive in terms of content, editorial, analytics and so on to cook up such personalised feasts each week.
In the other camp there's currently me, and a few converts, who believe in the 'snacking' approach. My feeling is that as we are a business information resource trying to give uber-busy people hyper-relevant information, then we are better off deliver very small amounts of information but potentially much more regularly e.g. daily, or more than daily.
As an exmple of this, when we relaunched our site recently, we sent users 1 e-mail a day over 5 days to explain the new site, rather than one big e-mail with everything in it. Most peope we've talked to felt this worked really well, and the metrics certainly support this, but then some have said it was too much.
So I'm thinking something more like Google Alerts (no images, HTML text only) rather than the fat lunch of a weekly "publication". I can see how this would work for consumer markets where pictures and inspiration may be important but I'm not convinced it's right for us? I get a lot of excellent industry weekly newsletters and I keep meaning to get round to reading them but I just never do... a few weeks later I delete them. So they'll be seeing lots of opens from me but no clicks.
The other reasons I favour a more Google Alert style e-mail are:
- Professionals in the industry are less impressed with how it looks and much more concerned with whether it is relevant and useful.
- Deliverability is much less of an issues with simpler alert style e-mails.
- Fewer bandwidth / speed / infrastructure issues
- Accessibility as a legal compliance requirement has not yet impacted e-mail in the way it has websites, but why not? Surely this will come. And when it does I don't want to have to undo the expensive fat lunch of a design I'd cooked up...
- We can easily port such e-mails to RSS and for use on mobile devices (much harder for the fat lunch newsletters...)
So what do you think? Refine the fat lunch or let people snack when they want to?
("it depends on your current metrics" or "both" are not acceptable answers... ;) )
Thanks for any help.
Regards
Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com
Rok Hrastnik
International Internet Director at Studio Moderna

28 February 2006 15:16pm

Ashley,
In my experience the only relevant answer is "do both".
Some subscribers will prefer to receive customized e-mail alerts, while others will prefer to receive targeted ("best of" in their topics of interests) weekly e-zine issues.
But if you also want to add some metrics into the mix:
Back in 2003 when I still worked with the leading business daily in Slovenia (app. 30.000 e-mail subscribers; monthly reach of about 60.000) we offered (well, they still do) a full daily newsletter issue (about 30 articles links to top daily content) and a fully customizable (keywords, authors, topics etc.) e-mail alert service.
The e-mail alert service attracted about 10% of the full daily newsletter subscription base. While it was perceived as an added value service, doing a few additional clicks to customize your own e-mail alert service was too much for most users.
It's the same reason why most customization initiatives infact fail --- people are just too lazy to do it.
In essence, it would be best if you could offer both services and not just stick with one.
And BTW - both types of content can easily be delivered via RSS anyway, so no problem there.
All the best,
Rok Hrastnik
MarketingStudies.net
Sophie Bessemer Gold
Head of Strategic Communications at EdComs

01 March 2006 09:49am

It depends how much you intend to personalise/customise the snacks you're offering.
It struck me receiving this morning's google alert after yesterday's e-consultancy round up that the problem with only using the alerts is that sometimes you just don't know what you're interested till you are force fed it.
My google alerts are poorly set up - user incompetence - so deliver nil value but e-consultancy's weekly fat lunch round up often throws up something I've not come across on the site before and would never have listed as an interest (or perhaps was too incompetent to list as an interest). But I read the interview, and then maybe it chimes with something else, and suddenly I am interested.
On 10:23:02 28 February 2006 Ashley wrote:

As mentioned in my original post we (E-consultancy.com) are looking at our own e-mail marketing strategy and approach at the moment.

There seem to be two camps appearing with split views on what might work best for us.

Three people (e-mail marketing service providers or consultants) that I've talked to, and whose views I respect, focus very much on the newsletter as the main vehicle for driving value both for the user and for us. So it is about improving the newsletter through increased personalisation of content, very fine levels of testing and tweaking in terms of design and layout etc. This is the weekly E-busines Briefing newsletter that we send to around 20,000 opted-in subscribers each week.

To me this is the 'fat lunch' approach - trying to make that single, important, piece of communication so wonderfully appetising that readers will look forward to it every week, open and respond to it, and pass it on to their friends. Of course, it is expensive in terms of content, editorial, analytics and so on to cook up such personalised feasts each week.

In the other camp there's currently me, and a few converts, who believe in the 'snacking' approach. My feeling is that as we are a business information resource trying to give uber-busy people hyper-relevant information, then we are better off deliver very small amounts of information but potentially much more regularly e.g. daily, or more than daily.

As an exmple of this, when we relaunched our site recently, we sent users 1 e-mail a day over 5 days to explain the new site, rather than one big e-mail with everything in it. Most peope we've talked to felt this worked really well, and the metrics certainly support this, but then some have said it was too much.

So I'm thinking something more like Google Alerts (no images, HTML text only) rather than the fat lunch of a weekly "publication". I can see how this would work for consumer markets where pictures and inspiration may be important but I'm not convinced it's right for us? I get a lot of excellent industry weekly newsletters and I keep meaning to get round to reading them but I just never do... a few weeks later I delete them. So they'll be seeing lots of opens from me but no clicks.

The other reasons I favour a more Google Alert style e-mail are:
- Professionals in the industry are less impressed with how it looks and much more concerned with whether it is relevant and useful.
- Deliverability is much less of an issues with simpler alert style e-mails.
- Fewer bandwidth / speed / infrastructure issues
- Accessibility as a legal compliance requirement has not yet impacted e-mail in the way it has websites, but why not? Surely this will come. And when it does I don't want to have to undo the expensive fat lunch of a design I'd cooked up...
- We can easily port such e-mails to RSS and for use on mobile devices (much harder for the fat lunch newsletters...)

So what do you think? Refine the fat lunch or let people snack when they want to?
("it depends on your current metrics" or "both" are not acceptable answers... ;) )

Thanks for any help.

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com
David Hughes
Strategic Consultant at Non-line Marketing

01 March 2006 10:06am

Let's keep the food metaphor rolling for at least one more course...
I tend to agree with Sophie's idea that your Fat Lunch will introduce people to things they may normally steer clear of. It's good to sit down to a proper meal once a week and try some new titbits - you may even get a taste for them.
As a picky old email marketing specialist I am increasingly eating a more varied diet of web metrics, landing page optimisation, site design and acquisition tools. It's healthy for you, and gives you insight into the broader digital areas that you may not have thought about.  And even if email marketing is a healthy option, you need the nutrients of traffic driving and page design to get the best out of your own favourites
Don't force feed us a diet of empty calorie alert snacks, but educate us by suggesting different dishes to try - it will be good for us and we are happy to be led by your recommendations ("The Content Automation is particlularly good today sir").
So you're probably on the right track already - a weekly family meal with some new dishes but a regular supply of our favourite alerts to keep our energy levels up.

Think that's about as far as this metaphor can be extended - I'm off for a chocolate muffin.
David
On 09:49:02 1 March 2006 sophiebess wrote:
It depends how much you intend to personalise/customise the snacks you're offering.
It struck me receiving this morning's google alert after yesterday's e-consultancy round up that the problem with only using the alerts is that sometimes you just don't know what you're interested till you are force fed it.

My google alerts are poorly set up - user incompetence - so deliver nil value but e-consultancy's weekly fat lunch round up often throws up something I've not come across on the site before and would never have listed as an interest (or perhaps was too incompetent to list as an interest). But I read the interview, and then maybe it chimes with something else, and suddenly I am interested.

On 10:23:02 28 February 2006 Ashley wrote:

As mentioned in my original post we (E-consultancy.com) are looking at our own e-mail marketing strategy and approach at the moment.

There seem to be two camps appearing with split views on what might work best for us.

Three people (e-mail marketing service providers or consultants) that I've talked to, and whose views I respect, focus very much on the newsletter as the main vehicle for driving value both for the user and for us. So it is about improving the newsletter through increased personalisation of content, very fine levels of testing and tweaking in terms of design and layout etc. This is the weekly E-busines Briefing newsletter that we send to around 20,000 opted-in subscribers each week.

To me this is the 'fat lunch' approach - trying to make that single, important, piece of communication so wonderfully appetising that readers will look forward to it every week, open and respond to it, and pass it on to their friends. Of course, it is expensive in terms of content, editorial, analytics and so on to cook up such personalised feasts each week.

In the other camp there's currently me, and a few converts, who believe in the 'snacking' approach. My feeling is that as we are a business information resource trying to give uber-busy people hyper-relevant information, then we are better off deliver very small amounts of information but potentially much more regularly e.g. daily, or more than daily.

As an exmple of this, when we relaunched our site recently, we sent users 1 e-mail a day over 5 days to explain the new site, rather than one big e-mail with everything in it. Most peope we've talked to felt this worked really well, and the metrics certainly support this, but then some have said it was too much.

So I'm thinking something more like Google Alerts (no images, HTML text only) rather than the fat lunch of a weekly "publication". I can see how this would work for consumer markets where pictures and inspiration may be important but I'm not convinced it's right for us? I get a lot of excellent industry weekly newsletters and I keep meaning to get round to reading them but I just never do... a few weeks later I delete them. So they'll be seeing lots of opens from me but no clicks.

The other reasons I favour a more Google Alert style e-mail are:
- Professionals in the industry are less impressed with how it looks and much more concerned with whether it is relevant and useful.
- Deliverability is much less of an issues with simpler alert style e-mails.
- Fewer bandwidth / speed / infrastructure issues
- Accessibility as a legal compliance requirement has not yet impacted e-mail in the way it has websites, but why not? Surely this will come. And when it does I don't want to have to undo the expensive fat lunch of a design I'd cooked up...
- We can easily port such e-mails to RSS and for use on mobile devices (much harder for the fat lunch newsletters...)

So what do you think? Refine the fat lunch or let people snack when they want to?
("it depends on your current metrics" or "both" are not acceptable answers... ;) )

Thanks for any help.

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com
Rok Hrastnik
International Internet Director at Studio Moderna

01 March 2006 10:30am

Exactly!
Let's just not forget that we're all lazy in setting-up our subscriptions, especially when it comes to customization.
Sophie also makes an excellent point that sometimes we just don't know what we're interested in.
On 09:49:02 1 March 2006 sophiebess wrote:
It depends how much you intend to personalise/customise the snacks you're offering.
It struck me receiving this morning's google alert after yesterday's e-consultancy round up that the problem with only using the alerts is that sometimes you just don't know what you're interested till you are force fed it.

My google alerts are poorly set up - user incompetence - so deliver nil value but e-consultancy's weekly fat lunch round up often throws up something I've not come across on the site before and would never have listed as an interest (or perhaps was too incompetent to list as an interest). But I read the interview, and then maybe it chimes with something else, and suddenly I am interested.

On 10:23:02 28 February 2006 Ashley wrote:

As mentioned in my original post we (E-consultancy.com) are looking at our own e-mail marketing strategy and approach at the moment.

There seem to be two camps appearing with split views on what might work best for us.

Three people (e-mail marketing service providers or consultants) that I've talked to, and whose views I respect, focus very much on the newsletter as the main vehicle for driving value both for the user and for us. So it is about improving the newsletter through increased personalisation of content, very fine levels of testing and tweaking in terms of design and layout etc. This is the weekly E-busines Briefing newsletter that we send to around 20,000 opted-in subscribers each week.

To me this is the 'fat lunch' approach - trying to make that single, important, piece of communication so wonderfully appetising that readers will look forward to it every week, open and respond to it, and pass it on to their friends. Of course, it is expensive in terms of content, editorial, analytics and so on to cook up such personalised feasts each week.

In the other camp there's currently me, and a few converts, who believe in the 'snacking' approach. My feeling is that as we are a business information resource trying to give uber-busy people hyper-relevant information, then we are better off deliver very small amounts of information but potentially much more regularly e.g. daily, or more than daily.

As an exmple of this, when we relaunched our site recently, we sent users 1 e-mail a day over 5 days to explain the new site, rather than one big e-mail with everything in it. Most peope we've talked to felt this worked really well, and the metrics certainly support this, but then some have said it was too much.

So I'm thinking something more like Google Alerts (no images, HTML text only) rather than the fat lunch of a weekly "publication". I can see how this would work for consumer markets where pictures and inspiration may be important but I'm not convinced it's right for us? I get a lot of excellent industry weekly newsletters and I keep meaning to get round to reading them but I just never do... a few weeks later I delete them. So they'll be seeing lots of opens from me but no clicks.

The other reasons I favour a more Google Alert style e-mail are:
- Professionals in the industry are less impressed with how it looks and much more concerned with whether it is relevant and useful.
- Deliverability is much less of an issues with simpler alert style e-mails.
- Fewer bandwidth / speed / infrastructure issues
- Accessibility as a legal compliance requirement has not yet impacted e-mail in the way it has websites, but why not? Surely this will come. And when it does I don't want to have to undo the expensive fat lunch of a design I'd cooked up...
- We can easily port such e-mails to RSS and for use on mobile devices (much harder for the fat lunch newsletters...)

So what do you think? Refine the fat lunch or let people snack when they want to?
("it depends on your current metrics" or "both" are not acceptable answers... ;) )

Thanks for any help.

Regards

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com