I was excited to see the Subscribers Rule! presentation given by Chip House at the Email Insiders Summit, as the subject is very dear to my heart. In fact, ExactTarget is so committed to subscribers being in charge that they have launched a website (www.subscribersrule.com) and printed "Subscribers Rule!" t-shirts and stickers. Alas, I failed to pick up a t-shirt for me to wear when speaking on this very subject at the Inbox/Outbox Conference in London later this month - but regardless of not achieving a new item for my wardrobe, Chip made some great points regarding subscribers and the 4 levels of permission:
- Opt-in
- Content
- Frequency
- Channel
Morgan Stewart also wrote a great Media Post column this week about subscribers and their preferences and I encourage you to read it.
I think we are all in agreeance that one of the main things which need to be done is education of the marketer (yep -that's us). We, the marketers, need to understand that lists are people. The subscriber already knows that the future of email marketing is in their hands and they're telling us what they want and what they don't want - it's up to us to listen.
I believe we're at the stage in email marketing's evolution where we as marketers actually need to stop and simply change our perspective from being marketer focused to being subscriber focused… which is coincidently the name of the UK DMA's Conference being held this week at the London Zoo - "Customer Focused Emails: Marketing to people not lists."
If you're interested in learning more about this then I encourage you to come to the Conference this Thursday the 5th June. To find out more please go to http://www.dma.org.uk/content/Evt-Article.asp?id=4300 or call Catherine Gibbon on +44 (0) 20 7291 3355.
Originally Posted: Be Relevant
Labels: subscriber focused
