Making Money On-line: Email Marketing Isn’t Owned Media

Email marketing has an unfortunate reputation as being owned media. It’s unfortunate because it doesn’t align marketers with their subscribers and inbox providers, who are the true owners of email. And that results in strategies and tactics that invariably end up hurting their email programs and their businesses.

Some of you might be thinking, Wait, but we own our list. We spent a lot of time and money collecting those email addresses.

It’s true that brands have ownership over the email addresses they’ve collected. They can use them to identify customers and prospects across channels, and even sell them to other companies (which we highly discourage). But, beyond owning them as an identifier, brands don’t own email addresses because they don’t own the relationship that makes up the vast majority of each address’s worth.

In my book Email Marketing Rules (3rd Ed.), I say, “Lists are owned only to the extent that someone can own a collection of nonbinding handshake agreements.” Subscribers can nullify most of the value of a brand knowing their email address by withdrawing their permission—either by unsubscribing, reporting the sender’s emails as spam, or simply by ignoring the sender’s emails for a while, at which point their inbox provider will start junking or blocking their emails to the individual.

Permission is where the vast majority of email’s value comes from, and no one can own or sell someone’s permission. Period.

You might concede that point, but be thinking, But for those people who have given me permission, I own that right to reach them via email so long as I maintain their permission.

Unfortunately, that’s not completely true because of inbox providers. In exercising their right to protect their users, inbox providers routinely junk and block emails from senders both on an individual level and global level. So, the emails you send to your very happy, very engaged subscribers could be completely blocked because of how your other subscribers are reacting to your emails.

You not only need to maintain permission with individuals, but stay in good standing with the community of users at each inbox provider. And that’s in addition to staying in the good graces of blacklist operators.

Okay, you might be thinking, permission is critical. But just like I can’t force people to give me permission to email them, I can’t force people to come to my website or store either and I definitely own those. So, how is email not owned like I own my website or store?

There are definitely some parallels, but the comparison breaks down pretty quickly. The biggest thing is that people are in complete control as to when they visit your website or store. If they don’t want to go, then they don’t go and that’s the end of the story.

Email doesn’t work that way, especially in the US where opt-out is still the law of the land and many brands only follow the law rather than best practice. If you’re a customer, you can expect to get transactional emails, some of which stretch the definition of being essential to an ongoing business relationship. Oftentimes, especially in the US, being a customer means that you’re automatically opted in to receive marketing emails. Sometimes those marketing emails come from multiple lists, and brands don’t always make it clear or easy to unsubscribe from all of those lists.

Getting away from permission for minute, let’s talk just about engaged subscribers, people who absolutely want to hear from you via email. Imagine that every time you opened your web browser, the websites to your favorite stores routinely popped up, even if you weren’t in the mood to shop.

Wait a minute. That’s an unfair analogy because they gave us permission, remember? They said it was okay to contact them.

Let’s be honest: Most brands don’t do a great job of telling people at signup how many emails they’re going to receive. To be fair, that’s in part because it can and should change. It’s also rare for brands to give subscribers the ability to change the frequency at which they receive emails.

Yes, some brands, including many Oracle Marketing Cloud Consulting clients, wisely alter email frequency on a per-subscriber basis depending on RFM modeling and email engagement levels, including significantly lowering email frequency for inactive subscribers. However, most brands don’t yet take those actions.

Email frequency is a tricky issue, for sure. My point here is that email marketing has additional rules of engagement that your website and store don’t simply because of the fact that email is largely a push channel, whereas your website and store are purely pull channels.

Alright, you might admit, but I still own my email creative. I design and code my emails just like I design and code my website. Again, I definitely own my website, so I own at least that element of email as well.

That’s not totally true either. First, subscribers can block images in your emails, hampering your ability to convey your message, especially if you’re promoting a lifestyle or physical products.

Yes, but I know that’s a possibility, which is why I code my emails so they’re able to communicate effectively when images aren’t enabled, using alt text for my images and HTML text wherever possible.

Excellent. You should totally do that. However, a second point is that there are no rendering standards for email, unlike with web development. Code support is different across all the various email clients. For example, instead of supporting CSS- and HTML-based email interactivity, Gmail supports AMP for Email. That’s just one high profile example of the patchwork that is email rendering.

While this creates a messy design and development environment, it’s not insurmountable. The bigger issue is that it’s always in flux, and inbox providers have historically done a really poor job of notifying the email community that they’re changing the code that they support—which is to say, they generally don’t bother to let us know.

If you’re previewing your emails before sending them, rendering changes are unlikely to catch you totally by surprise. However, as more brands get an ever-increasing percentage of their email marketing revenue—in some cases, the majority of it—through automated email campaigns, this chaotic rendering environment can mean scrambling to update a lot of triggered emails all of a sudden. Rendering changes is certainly one reason to always be optimizing your automated emails and never setting and forgetting them.

Okay, you might say, if email marketing isn’t owned media, then what is it?

The root of the misconception here is that email marketing doesn’t fit into the traditional paid-owned-earned (POE) media model. That model is outdated. In fact, social media doesn’t fit into that model either. The model needs to be expanded to include leased media to account for social media, and granted media to account for email marketing, as well as a few other marketing channels that don’t fit in the POE media model.

Adding leased and granted media to the mix gives you the more accurate and comprehensive POGLE media model, which I discuss in Email Marketing Rules and map out in the chart below.

What are the key characteristics that distinguish granted media from owned media?

While owned media is content created by the brand that’s distributed to an audience developed by the brand via a closed platform controlled by the brand, granted media is content created by the brand that’s distributed to an audience developed by the brand via an open platform that’s regulated and controlled by multiple third parties.

The other three media types are also unique in terms of who creates the content, who developed the audience it’s being distributed to, and who controls the platform through which it’s distributed, as you can see below.

In the case of email, the third parties that control the distribution platform are inbox providers like Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Verizon Media Group. They’re the reason why deliverability is inconsistent across inboxes and why rendering is, too.

While that can be a serious pain, it comes with major benefits as well. For instance, because no one company has total control over email inboxes,…

Email’s core functionality hasn’t changed radically over the years, providing stability to email marketing strategies and investments.
The changes that have occurred—and there have been plenty of significant ones—tend to evolve slowly, starting at one inbox provider and then becoming adopted at others, a process that typically gives brands plenty of time to adjust.
Email accounts can be accessed on a variety of devices, from computers and smartphones to smartwatches and voice-assistants.
New consumer email accounts can be created for free.
Sending emails is free for consumers and inexpensive for commercial senders compared to other marketing channels.

So, the next time you’re cursing your rendering or deliverability issues and are hesitant to invest in the training or consulting needed to fix them, remember that these problems are the cost we pay as an industry for email being an inexpensive open platform. The closed platforms of leased and paid media don’t have these issues, but they’re subject to instability (i.e., R.I.P. MySpace), huge business model shifts (i.e., Facebook’s organic engagement decline), and their costs are high (i.e., all paid media).

Geez, you might be thinking, while I wish email marketing acted more like owned media, I’m super glad it’s not leased or paid media. Email marketing is tough sometimes, but it’s also ubiquitous, embraced by consumers, powerful, and highly profitable. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Me neither.

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