夹在中间的电子邮件

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　　夹在中间的电子邮件—被打的猴子
　　
　　摘自CLICKZ 作者: Al DiGuido 编译: John Zhang
　　
　　还记得孩提时代玩过的 “夹在中间的猴子(类似中国的丢沙包)” 游戏吗? 那时是一个简单的世界. 所需要的仅仅是一个大的沙滩球和另外两个朋友一起来玩. 目标是夹在两个朋友间的 “猴子” 去抓住在他头顶上被来回投掷的球. 需要不停跳动, 尽可能抓到球,同时不要被球打到. 没人喜欢做中间的猴子, 通常是又累又没面子.
　　
　　纵观过去7年左右时间的电子邮件沟通渠道革命, 总是感觉我们所代表的渠道就是夹在中间的猴子.被诽谤和嘲笑, 戏谑, 并且努力干活;未受到应得的尊敬. 我们的沟通渠道被冠以 “混乱”, 发出的信息被叫做 “垃圾”. 夹在媒介采购及CRM投球者中间, 我们继续努力, 以展示我们的重要和价值. 夹在中间是重要的而且就是我们应该处在的位置.
　　
　　营销人员应该开始考虑这个游戏的方式. 经常看到很多公司在搜索引擎上花费数千百万美元. 负责媒介采购的营销人员对CPA和CPL津津乐道, 对到达他们站点的销售机会朗朗上口. 但这是远远不够的, 如果可能, 需要对隐藏其后的从获得机会到交易到此孤立行为到建立生命周期价值的战略进行讨论. 没人花时间去研究和展示给公司的财务部门在交易和生命价值周期之间媒介采购到底起到了哪些作用. 为什么不把公司的搜索和电邮客户保持工具, 团队, 和策略合并起来以获得联合的创造更好更有利润的客户保持计划? 如果由我来运营贵公司, 一定会有这样的疑问.
　　
　　在另一端的是我们一直参与的CRM系统工作, 客服数据和电邮服务的脱钩节使我们抓狂. 实例: 情人节, 一个线上花店让我大失所望. 在线订花后, (根据订单号, 通过游览网站上的 “处理中” 状态) 在线跟踪订单. 我期待着收到礼物的人打来高兴的电话，然而,什么者没有发生, 也没有来自花店的邮件. 直到两天后, 花店的客服打了三个紧急的道歉电话说我的花没有送到. ( 顺便提一下, 我是节日前一个月下订单, 要求节日前两天送到) 我再也没有回复过那个电话.
　　
　　我不确定这个花店在此过程能得到什么. 难道实时发送一封邮件使我了解订单状态有多么难吗? 真是难以原谅的烂生意. 每年的线上鲜花买家在增加, 大量的生意就这样流走.
　　
　　后来, 我变得对整个社交网络和博客着迷. 这对公司来讲是另一个错过的机会. 做为电邮布道者, 我们一直为建立客户关系和生命周期价值中最有力的单元获得尊敬而不断奋斗. 我们为必须集成尽可能多的数据到客户细分和消息模板中进行斗争. 要知道, 要想获得效率, 必须不断证明对接收人的相关性, 否则就会被标记为垃圾邮件.
　　
　　由于处在客户生命周期中间, 我们极其渴望输入所有跟生意相关的方方面面以使与客户的沟通做得更好. 如是你还没有开始研究从社交网络和博客传播出来的数据, 那一个新的有力的提供强大的品牌, 客户推荐和趋势的渠道正在流失. 过去一年中, 不得不承认, 我对这个有闲人群的集合组成的新渠道也感到离奇. 我错了.
　　
　　有很多工具可以提供世界上博客们关于你公司, 产品, 服务, 竞争对手产品和服务项目, 以及市场趋势的观点. 一群失落的作者正以指数的速度增长到全球数十亿的博客,　并且每天都在新增加一百万个博客. 这是一个实时专注的群体, 你可以实时获得他们的观点并集成到你的邮件中去, 使你更多地了解客户真正想法的主流, 提高邮件信息的相关性.
　　
　　做为夹在媒介购买和客户生命周期中间的邮件从业者,我们比口头布道者要在发送能力和筛选能力方面做得更多. 现在是需要组织中有人站出来从游戏者手中抢走球了．电邮没有集成到公司的客户生命周期的其它单元显得非常重要．如果以前与搜索和网站开发部门合作不紧密，为什么现在不呢？如果CRM的那帮家伙坐在他们的船舱里觉得诸事如意, 因为抱怨正在减少, 你就应该冲到CEO办公室并且组织集成战略会议来研究公司的不足.
　　
　　如果这些都失败了,可以走到财务部(他们会倾听那些对提高效率有想法者的高见), 让他们知道你实在厌倦了观看这场游戏. 该是游戏中猴子主导的时候了, 可以展示给他们如何把搜索, 网站分析, CRM, 电邮执行,及来自博客和社交网络数据的结合及均衡, 帮公司节省百万美元和更多利润.
　　
　　如果他们也不听你所说并不采取必要措施, 那就需要拿到球, 让别的孩子来玩了.
　　
　　E-mail (Monkey) in the Middle
　　
　　By Al DiGuido, The ClickZ Network, Mar 6, 2008
　　
　　作者简介: Long recognized as one of the direct response industry's premier innovators and a pioneer in e-mail communications, Al DiGuido brings over 20 years of marketing, sales, management, and operations expertise to his role as CEO of full-service digital marketing company Zeta Interactive. Formerly Epsilon Interactive's CEO, DiGuido also served as CEO of Bigfoot Interactive, CEO of Expression Engines, EVP at Ziff Davis, and publisher of Computer Shopper, where he launched ComputerShopper.com, a groundbreaking direct-to-consumer e-commerce engine. Prior to Ziff Davis, he was VP/advertising director for Sports Inc. DiGuido also serves on the Direct Marketing Association's Ethics Policy Committee.
　　
　　正文:
　　
　　Do you remember playing the game "Monkey in the Middle" as a kid? I may be dating myself, but I vividly recall spending hours with two other friends playing this game. It was a simpler world back then. All you needed was a big beach ball and two other friends to play. The object was for the "monkey" in the middle of two friends to capture the ball, which was tossed from one kid to the other over your head. You'd jump, reaching as high as you could to snare that ball, thereby escaping your middle status and becoming one of the tossers. No one really enjoyed being the monkey in the middle. It was usually a lot of work and at times humiliating.
　　
　　Watching the evolution of the e-mail communications channel over the past seven years or so, I've always felt as if the channel we represent has been the monkey in the middle. At times, it's maligned and ridiculed, made fun of, and worked around; it hasn't gotten the respect it deserves. Our communications channel has been termed "cluttered" and at times our messages called "spam." Some of us continue to work very hard to snare the ball between the acquisition and CRM (define) tossers to show the world just how important and valuable we are. Being in the middle is important and is exactly where we should be.
　　
　　Marketers must start thinking in a more game-like manner. I continue to see companies spend millions of dollars for SEM (define). Acquisition-happy marketers who are pleased to discuss cost-per-action and cost-per-lead metrics. They cite chapter and verse about leads driven to their sites. Yet there's very little, if any, discussion of the strategy behind acquiring this lead and transaction and sustaining the relationship beyond this solitary event to building lifetime value. It's mind boggling that we spend little or no time working with the acquisition side of the house to demonstrate to our companies' finance departments the relationship between transactions and lifetime value. Why aren't you combining your search and e-mail retention tools, teams, and strategies to show the power of this combination in creating better and more profitable customer retention programs? If I were running your company, you can be sure I'd be asking.
　　
　　On the other side of the middle is all the work that we do inside our collective CRM systems. It drives me crazy that customer service data and e-mail services aren't more tightly joined. A real life example: this past Valentine's Day, an online flower merchant disappointed me for the last time. I order my flowers online. I track the order online (by visiting the Web site and viewing an "in process" status on my order number). I wait for that joyful series of calls from recipients telling me they've received my gift. Then, nothing. Nothing from the intended recipients. No e-mail from the merchant. Nothing. Two days later, I got three urgent telephone calls from customer service apologizing for not delivering my flowers. (By the way, I placed the order a month before the holiday and asked the flowers to be delivered two days before the holiday). I never returned the telephone call.
　　
　　I'm not sure what part of this equation this flower merchant doesn't get. How hard is it to send me an e-mail letting me know my order's status in real time? It's unforgivable. It's just bad business. After years of my business, that merchant has lost me as a customer. There's no viable excuse. Every year, we have Valentine's Day. Every year, an increasing number of people order flowers online. Keep disappointing customers by not communicating and integrating the back end of your systems with e-mail notification and service messaging, and you're done.
　　
　　Of late, I've become obsessed with the entire area of social networking and blogging. This is another missed opportunity for companies. As e-mail evangelists, we constantly struggle for respect as the most powerful element in building customer relationships and lifetime value. We argue that we must integrate as much data as we can into our segmentation and messaging models. We understand now that e-mail, to be effective, must continually prove its relevance to the recipient or we'll be tagged spam.
　　
　　As we sit in the middle of the customer lifecycle, we are ravenous for input from all sides of our business to better shape our communications with customers. If you haven't begun studying the data emanating from social networks and blog, you're missing a new and powerful channel that provides incredible insight on brand, customer preferences, and trends. I must admit that prior to the last year of work, I treated this new channel as another quirky assembly of folks with a lot of time on their hands. I was wrong.
　　
　　There are tools in the market today that can provide tremendous insight into what the universe of bloggers are saying about your company, your offerings, your service, your competitors' products and services, and marketplace trends. What started off as a bunch of frustrated writers has grown exponentially to a universe of over 100 million blogs and is expanding at a rate of 1 million new bloggers a day. This is a real-time focus group whose insight can be gained and integrated into your e-messaging in real time. Armed with this information, you have opened up yet another data stream that, leveraged properly, can tighten your messaging in e-mail to be much more relevant to your customers. Or you can act like this channel isn't relevant or important enough to you, di***issing the data as outside of the mainstream of what real customers think.
　　
　　My view as an e-mail professional in the middle of this game, between acquisition and customer lifetime value, is we need to be much more than vocal evangelists for deliverability and filtering of images. It's time someone in the organization stepped up and grabbed the ball from the other kids playing this game. It's much too important for e-mail not to be integrally joined with the other elements of your company's customer lifecycle. If you aren't working closely with your company's search and Web development components, why not? If your CRM folks are sitting in their silo acting like everything is going great because complaints are down, you need to bust in to the CEO's office and demand that integrated strategy meetings and metrics be instituted for the sake of the company.
　　
　　If all else fails, walk into the finance department (they will always listen to folks who have ideas about being more efficient), and let them know you're tired of watching this game being played. It's time that the monkey in the middle started running the game. You can show them how integrating and leveraging insight from search, Web analytics, CRM, e-mail deployment, and data from blogs and social media can save the company millions of dollars and make it more profitable.
　　
　　If they won't hear you and take the necessary action, it's time to take the ball and find some other kids to play with. (end)