Don't Make These Common E-Marketing Mistakes

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, August, 2000

If you are planning on doing e-mail marketing--and what circulator isn't--there are some mistakes you can avoid. John Rizzi, president and CEO, e-Dialog Inc., a two-year-old company whose clients include Lycos, Harvard, the NFL and Dunn & Bradstreet, says the most common mistakes are: (1) E-marketers assume the phone center can handle e-mail responses.

"We've found that very few companies are equipped to handle incoming e-mail," Rizzi says. "You say the people in the call center can do the job but, remarkably, they can't type or whatever. We don't know why, but we see it over and over. You sometimes need a specialist." (2) The call to action is almost always to go to the Web site; many e-marketers don't anticipate that people will ignore that directive and just click the reply button. (3) When e-marketers get the replies by e-mail, those replies are lost because e-marketers don't know how to integrate them with other information they have, such as profile data. (4) The Web site is not prepared for the huge am ount traffic e-marketing can generate. It gets hammered. It crashes and everyone is unhappy. (5) E-marketers send people to the home page where they get a lot of general information about the Web site. But "that doesn't mean anything to the respondent," says Rizzi. "In my mind it's irresponsible because there's no precision. It's not what you tempted the person to come for. If you're doing that, shame on you!"