Email Marketing Innovation and Growth

A Conversation with Jeanniey Mullen, Vice President of Email Marketing, OgilvyOne

In preparation for this week's ad:tech conference in San Francisco, last week we announced the launch of Click Suite for Interactive Marketers, which is a set of tools intended to help online marketers engage customers via voice and track results across both online and phone channels. Email campaigns are a natural fit for these kinds of solutions.

This week, we spoke to one of the pioneers of email marketing, Jeanniey Mullen, to get her insight into some of the challenges facing email marketers and what they can do to create and track innovative campaigns.  Jeanniey is executive director, senior partner, worldwide email marketing at OgilvyOne Worldwide, a global leader in customer relationship management and interactive marketing, and founder of the Email Experience Council. (Disclosure: OgilvyOne Worldwide is an eStara partner, and eStara is a member of the Email Experience Council) She is also a regular columnist for ClickZ.

Below, Jeanniey shares her thoughts with us on Email Marketing Innovation and some new tools available to interactive marketers:

eStara: Recently, you helped found the Email Experience Council. What is it, and what drove you to start the organization?

JM: Yes, I founded the Email Experience Council almost one year ago- in May of 2006. There were a few things that drove me to start this organization…The main reason is that I was noticing email was transforming from a marketing supplement to a very important and undeniable communication channel in life of consumers.

Email had become the backbone of all digital communications. While that was very exciting, from a marketing standpoint, email was still being seen as the supplemental, "cheap" channel to use, and was being grossly under funded. This under funding and misuse of the vehicle was causing email to get a bad rap in some cases. Something needed to be done to celebrate the tremendous return on investment that email delivers, and to help act as the voice for email to ensure it received the attention and accolades it deserves so that future growth and usage would be done in a responsible and exciting manner.

eStara: Not long ago, you spoke at the Email Insider Summit about measurement standards in email marketing. What kind of work is the EEC doing to help standardize measurement metrics?

JM: Ooh, this is my favorite topic right now....So as I just said above, the EEC's mission is to act as the voice of email and determine what needs to be done in the industry to increase the level of respect it deserves. A few months ago, one of our committees (the deliverability and rendering roundtable) did a survey on how marketers measure email results. The findings indicated that there was a significant gap in the marketplace and that there are no standards in email. How can any marketer benchmark themselves against the industry, or each other, if none of the benchmarks match?

Since the EEC is dedicated to improving the use of email - and not legislative issues, we enlisted the help of David Daniels from Jupiter Research, and a whole slew of other industry organizations and leaders. David recently formed a coalition to help all of us get to consensus on what measurement standards should be. The EEC will be very active in this coalition as well as take the deliverable and help "interpret" how client-side marketers will best be able to leverage them when they are working on a project, or with their privacy and compliance group.

eStara: In a recent ClickZ story, you were quoted as saying email is a “digital backbone tying all other communication channels together." What are marketers doing to measure campaign effectiveness beyond click-through rates and across channels?

JM: This is a great question. It is definitely important to measure email effectiveness based on all of the different response aspects: delivery, open, click etc. But most larger companies use email as one of many ways of getting their message out- and in the end, they only look at one thing: how much revenue did my total marketing spend of $XXX bring - this is usually done at a macro level, where email plays a variety of roles in addition to direct sales.

Email has evolved - it now is used as a transactional vehicle to confirm on online purchase is made, it drives people to the site to buy, to the store, to the call center. Call centers send it to follow up with more information to help move things further along in the sales cycle; it connects people on social networks etc. Basically, there is no form on online marketing you can do without involving email as the drive to, reply from, or engagement tactic for the effort. Email has therefore become the digital backbone. It’s very cool.

eStara: You’ve worked with eStara on a few campaigns, what do you think click to call adds to email and interactive marketing efforts?

JM: I think click to call can be a very vital element of email and interactive marketing efforts. The first click to call campaign I did was almost 7 years ago now with a cruise line. It was amazing. We used it to help make the sales process easier for people looking to book a cruise. In this case, it reduced the sales cycle from hours to minutes and the entire inventory was sold out in record time. We love recommending click to call as a sales enablement vehicle across websites and in emails.

We advise people when to use it with much caution though. A lot of clients we have spoken to, often think they can put any button anywhere and it will become a miracle tool - but we are very clear to explain that a definitive strategy and approach much be devised, in accordance with proper placement, in order for the click to call effort to work its magic.

eStara: What other technologies do you see playing a significant role in enhancing the effectiveness of email marketing?

JM: It's kind of funny, but these days I see two things:

1) Video inside email is making a comeback - and like click to call, when used appropriately, it works wonders. When used irresponsibly - it causes a branding nightmare.

2) Elimination of best practices - with all of the collective focus we have put on making sure our emails get delivered, we have eliminated the use of the "fun" technologies like video email and click to call - these days, the spam identification tools have become so sophisticated that we can begin using these again without fear of being blocked for delivery. So, I am actually recommending people test ANY new technology they think could add some sizzle into their campaign and not worry so much about what "best practices" say won't work. Things like using flash to dynamically personalize images in one of the old no-no's from the past that is working well today.