Raising the stakes in permission marketing: The need to better manage enterprise e-mail processes

author: Jeremi Karnell – Founder & CMO

Similar to the early days of the Internet, when “brochureware”web sites were popping up all over the enterprise, corporate e-mail campaigns today tend to originate from multiple and often unconnected channels within an organization: sales, web, direct marketing, customer service, and in some cases, business partners.To make matters even more complicated, e-mail recipients are often given the choice of multiple response paths, including call center,online, and/or brick and mortar establishments. While it is desirable for all departments to be able to leverage the efficiency of the online channel, managing multiple outbound campaigns and their resulting inbound responses is a real challenge — one that needs to be addressed at a corporate level in order to ensure success.

The problem is that most organizations are not structured to manage the above process. Traditional approaches to sales and marketing do a poor job at addressing the sophisticated,cross-functional online/offline requirements that are inherent in abest-in-class e-mail program. A recent study by IMT Strategies titled Enterprise Permission Marketing: Best Practices for Managing Targeted E-Mail Programs Across the Organization states that “…E-Mail marketing managers complain that they are struggling to govern marketing programs and enforce meaningful permission policies on an enterprise level while at the same time growing their e-lists into the millions to stay ahead of the competition.”

The IMT study went on to uncover several important issues that are critical to the long-term viability of the e-mail channel,and must be addressed when crafting corporate e-mail strategies.Two key findings include:

• There is a growing gap between customer expectations for permission marketing and the permission marketing programs that Global 2000 marketers deliver
• Without better process and policy management, many marketers risk destroying the e-mail channel before it has time to mature