In the 1970’s dystopian sci-fi thriller, Soylent Green, Charlton Heston, upon discovering the secret source of the green tablets he and his fellow earth inhabitants have ingesting, declares, “Soylent Green is PEEEEEPLE!”  I conjure this obscure piece of Hollywood’s past to make the point that most email marketers treat their email lists in a similar way. Most look past their individual customers and treat their list as a discrete unit, as if it is an undifferentiated blob. To these marketers I want to say, “Email lists are PEEEEPLE!”

We’ve found that marketers are most successful, and optimize deliverability and their email reputation when they stop looking at their email lists as a single, monolithic, undifferentiated blob and begin treating it as a collection of discrete individuals, each with their own preferences for content, frequency and channel.

Let’s break that down. This has to do with deliverability, because deliverability success is ultimately in the hands of your reputation as a sender.  Send email that people want and you’ll have good deliverability. It really is as simple as that. To do that, you have to give the power back to the subscriber.

In our upcoming webinar with Forrester Research, we’re hoping to demonstrate some of the forces that are driving the control of the one-to-one marketing relationship out of the hands of the marketer…and into the hands of the subscriber. It’s a four-part story.

First, each subscriber “votes” with their permission (they ask to receive emails from you). As it turns out, it is the fact that the subscriber raises their hand and “asks” to become part of a dialog with you that is the best determining element of whether or not an email marketer will be successful at building their email reputation, and in turn, optimizing their email deliverability.

Second comes content. Did you make the effort to capture additional information about the preferences of each subscriber, or monitor their behavior via website analytics to determine what they like? Or, did you just decide that blasting the same message to your entire list was the best practice? Guess which method works best.

Third, is frequency or the rate at which a marketer sends their promotional emails. Our recent data shows that marketers have good reason to set appropriate expectations with their subscribers for email frequency – and then live up to them. In fact, one of our retail clients recently showed that they can actually entice formerly non-responsive subscribers to “reengage” (open, click and buy) by reducing the frequency of their emails. Counter intuitive? Maybe. Subscriber-friendly? Yes!

Fourth is channel. In today’s iPhone world, consumers have the choice of multiple messaging and marketing channels (email, phone, SMS, social networks, RSS, Twitter…and the list goes on). Our 2008 Channel Preference Survey showed that consumers may prefer one channel for messaging, and another for marketing. Yep, even teens like permission-based email!

Want to improve your email deliverability?  Improve it subscriber by subscriber by asking them what they want, when they want it, and via what channel they want it. All of our research and data says you won’t be sorry.