Email disaster recovery or a better planning process?

I periodically read MediaPost’s columns as they are one of the most reliable sources of information on trends in interactive marketing, particularly those dedicated to email and online advertisement. Last Thursday an article on email titled When a good e-mail goes bad, by Jeanniey Mullen from Ogilvy World Wide in New York, caught my attention. Can really a good email go bad? Or is it that it was good only to the eyes of those involved in the creation process?

At any given time, advertising agency as well as advertisers might make decisions based on personal perceptions or myths. Customer insight is frequently scarce and as humans we tend to create our own personal “personas” that might not necessarily fit the profile of those who will be actually receiving our message or eventually that “persona” might not react as we expected during the creative process. Therefore the need to balance the creative process with methodological procedures that provide the means to test, measure and adjust the final message that is going to be delivered.

As I discussed in my last post on the article published on The Economist, The Ultimate Marketing Machine, the most significant advantage of the digital media is the ability of marketers to track and act upon numbers, not words. This has been said over and over again since the inception of digital marketing practices on the mid 90s. However, few are the companies that have undergone the cultural change that requires the adoption of the digital media. Sending emails to a database religiously on time and without any spelling of grammar mistake, is not enough. Consumers change, they sometimes outgrow the brand promise, they get married, divorced, die or just change tastes. What worked before does not necessarily will work now.

Establishing a role inside the marketing team focused on deploying an effective testing, not for only email pieces, but also for all forms of digital and even offline communications, including Call to Actions, layouts, design, would help avoid thinking on how to fix that good email that unexpectedly went wrong.