E-Mail Marketing Suppliers, can you do this?

Either through a customer or utilizing the services I have used most of the most popular E-mail providers. My list includes Constant Contact, Vertical Response, IContact, Get Response and decent knowledge of several drip marketing programs such as Infusion and Swiftpage. I have limited knowledge with other auto-responders but have dabbled with a few. My question to them is with all the data available why am I so limited in being able to manipulate it and segment it?

A typical e-mail campaign will be released and I will get the standard statistics of deliverability that include bounces, opens, opt-outs, complaints, etc. I will see what links are clicked but to my knowledge only Constant Contact lets me see who clicked what link. I am allowed to segment the list with a few of the vendors but it is a tedious process.

If you review the material they publish, you will see creative ways of obtaining opt-ins, improve deliverability and how to effectively keep a list alive. But why can’t I see the data? Why can’t I see who clicks on what? Why can’t I see aging accounts? Why can’t I just drag and drop contacts into groups?

Would it not make sense for me to manage my e-zine based on what part of the funnel the customer is in? Would it not be important to see if open rates were decreasing by the amount of time the customer is in the hourglass? Or the amount of time they are stuck in one stage? If they attend a webinar or go to a seminar, you would move them down the hourglass. If they are repeat customers or referral customers, they receive different frequency and maybe different e-mails.

If I wanted to improve my e-mail marketing should these statistics be available? The ability to move individual and groups into different parts of the hourglass should be a no brainer? Is there any system that will allow me to do this?

I believe that if we want to reduce spam in our life, we need to create better e-mail management systems. I know all this may not be able to be automated but would this not be better use of the Email vendors time rather more templates, videos, surveys and just more products! I might be sticking my foot in my mouth, but can anyone do this?

PDCA Cycle introduction to Lean Marketing

6 thoughts on “E-Mail Marketing Suppliers, can you do this?”

Your frustration is understandable… and may be the Achilles heel of many Software as a Service or “Cloud Computing” vendors. Really, this is nothing new… vendors lock you out of your data and provide you “features” to see what they've decided you need to see.

I contend that the most interesting (and valuable in terms of ROI) questions are those that are unique to you and your business. That is why my company – justSignal http://justsignal.com – is built on the principal that your data is yours.

Want to pull it all out every hour and put it in your reporting database? No problem.

Hey Joe,

I think we may be able to do quite a bit of this with SwiftpageACT. Let's talk about it at the conference in Boulder.

Hi Joe –

While we aren't there quite yet we are working to get there, I might even suggest Know, Like, Trust…etc. as titles for stages.

However, when any of our customers ask questions like this we do have a solution that works for many of them. We have a pretty impressive list segmentation tool. Where you can pull from your master list by things you have noted, like last product purchased etc.

Then after you launched an email you can see all the openers, clickers and even purchasers (click to conversion) in a downloadable report. You can also select these lists to be uploaded into a new list.

I hope that helps!

Jenna – VerticalResponse