Ditching ‘Batch and Blast’

Rodale moves their email marketing platform closer to the one-to-one holy grail.

By Bill Mickey
Monday, March 2, 2009

Rodale last year completed a transition to a new email marketing system called the Marketing Decision Platform (MDP). The switch essentially leaves behind the traditional method of the scheduled, “batch and blast” approach in favor of one that is triggered by customer behavior and key data elements.

Like many multiplatform publishers, Rodale’s marketing communication channels have become incredibly complex. Just think of the number of touchpoints publishers use to target their audience. And with a customer database of 50 million names, plus email list growth of 25 percent per year for the last few years, you get a sense of the scale Rodale contends with. “A lot of new customers are coming from all over our branded sites,” says Todd Leiser, VP, Rodale Direct. “Anywhere someone is registering or signing up for a newsletter, an event or a promotion on a site. There’s a lot of activity, a lot of complex communication channels developing from that.”

Leiser has been chasing the holy grail of one-to-one direct marketing, where messages are targeted to a customer’s specific interests, for years, but has been hampered by the dual issues of technical and operational hurdles. “We can’t, in a traditional direct mail environment, be one-to-one because there’s too many barriers to that. So we had an email marketing environment that really mirrored that traditional approach: Plan a campaign for next Wednesday, for example, select the names that are eligible to receive that offer, and when Wednesday roles around, those customers all see that same offer on that day,” says Leiser.

The problem there, says Leiser, is there are subsets of customers in that Wednesday batch that would have been better targeted with a slightly different message. “Some might have been more interested in weight loss than cooking. But if it happened to be a cooking day, then that’s the email they were going to get.”

Also, the ISPs are particularly suspicious of large-batch email campaigns. “They don’t like large-volume blasts. They don’t want emails coming out that might have one or two million names with the same message on a given day. It’s not what they like to deliver, it doesn’t feel personalized on the other end and it creates noise. It’s a dialog we want to avoid as best we can.”

Putting Customers on Their Own Path

In an effort to break from the schedule-based email marketing method, Rodale spent part of 2008 rolling out an Acxiom-based system that attaches marketing to customer-based activities. “It’s a contact sequence that’s based on individual-level activity, or inactivity, and the timing of when they came in, where they signed up and whatever else we know about them. We’re then able to start them on a path of customer communications that’s much more relevant and much more timely.”

Called “strings,” Leiser says each customer has their own unique path of communication that’s monitored nightly by the new email marketing platform and evaluates the kind of communication that will go to that customer and when. “The decisioning process runs every evening and it decides on the next message based on what’s happened in that customer’s data—or what hasn’t happened. Did we send them an email two days ago for a Flat Belly Diet book and they didn’t respond? Maybe we’ll send them something different today.”

Internal interaction with the new system has been streamlined as well. Leiser says there’s not as much baton passing, “It’s now one big group working together in tandem.”

Leiser’s direct marketing team owns the operation, but the IT department pitches in with data-related activities and the marketing and circulation groups develop new creative and new offers.