Interesting article in the 1to1 Weekly newsletter from Peppers & Rogers Group (PRG).

PRG were the thought leaders and authors of a number of ‘must read’ books on 1to1 Marketing in the 1990’s. They are now part of Carlson Marketing – one of the top  marketing agencies in the world.

In the article PRG say marketers struggle to interact effectively with customers. They say e-mail marketing is failing to be used properly to fully develop interactivity with customers. They refer to a Forrester Research paper that quotes 95%+ of businesses and people using e-mails as a communication tool. Although so widely accepted 75% state they receive too many e-mails and 72% say they delete them without reading.

Why such a high deletion rate? The broadcast nature of much e-mail. Using socio-demographic profiling, adding credit card and financial information plus life style information helps form a better picture of the ‘target’ allows the message to be refined. Transactional information can also help. Think of Amazon and how they use ‘you bought this and so may like this’ targeted messages. However despite such in depth analytics this is still a form of mass customisation. A 10k mailer may have 10 variations but the target is still one of 1k or whatever the scaled number is. E-marketers are looking for permission to stay in contact until a response and sale is made rather than get feedback or develop a relationship.

So how does this play compared to podcasting? The best podcasts use audience feedback to start a dialogue and influence content. An audience is also self-selecting. They can subscribe or ‘play now’ and choose when and where to access them. I am amazed at the number of podcasters who have audiences in the thousands yet many marketing agencies do not seem to understand the power and economics of it.

Let’s look at some details:

An e-mail or direct mail campaign will generate leads in the range of 2% or 5%. Some will be higher thanks to clever targeting and generate maybe 2 – 3 times these numbers.

Let’s assume a 10% response rate. To get 10k responses you would have to e-mail or ‘snail mail’ of 100k. Renting 100k e-mail addresses would cost probably £15k+ and likely 10% would not get delivered anyway.

To create an audio podcast would cost less than £1.5k. So for the same price as a 100k+ one off e-mail campaign you could create a series of 10 podcasts. Now what size of audience can you build over those 10 programmes? What sort of conversation would develop and what sort of relationship over a sustained campaign?

Disclosure statement: When I was at Tektronix in the mid-1990’s responsible for marketing in Europe, RRG were consulting with us on implementing a 1to1 customer strategy. In 1999/2000 I worked with PRG Europe on a number of joint client projects implementing CRM strategies and programmes when I worked for the largest ICT focussed marketing agencies in Europe.