Building an Email Strategy After the Dot-Com Crash

By mid-2001, the dot-com crash had wiped out a huge share of online advertising spend and the businesses still standing were looking hard at which channels justified their cost. Email marketing, cheap to run and already pointed at people who’d bought something before, looked a lot better than it had a year earlier. Here’s how to build a program from nothing in that environment.

Start with the list you already have, not the one you wish you had

Every business with any transaction history has a customer list sitting in an order database, a CRM or a spreadsheet, and in 2001 that list was worth more than any amount of banner advertising you could still afford. Before building anything new, pull together every past customer and every person who’d ever asked a question, and get their consent to hear from you again.

Choose a provider built for the post-crash market

Several email service providers, including Responsys, Digital Impact and a growing field of competitors, had built businesses specifically around handling deliverability, list management and reporting for companies that no longer had a systems administrator to spare on running their own mail server. Evaluate providers on their deliverability track record with major ISPs, not just their feature list.

Get precise about your one goal

With budgets tight, there was no room for an email program that existed to “stay top of mind.” Pick a single measurable outcome, repeat purchases, newsletter-driven traffic or reactivating lapsed customers, and build your first few campaigns entirely around it. Vague goals were the fastest way to lose executive support for a program that was, in 2001, competing for a shrinking marketing budget.

Build a cadence that respects a tired inbox

Consumers had been getting more email for years by 2001, and patience for irrelevant messages was thinner than it had been in 1999. A tight, useful cadence beat a frequent one. Test biweekly against monthly before assuming more contact automatically means more revenue.

Watch deliverability like a budget line item

Spam complaint rates and blocklisting by ISPs had become a real operational risk by 2001, with services like the Mail Abuse Prevention System’s Realtime Blackhole List actively used by receiving mail servers to filter senders with bad reputations. Monitor bounce and complaint rates from your first campaign onward. A blocked domain erases every other decision you made correctly.

Report in terms your finance team understands

The businesses that kept their email programs funded through 2001’s downturn were the ones that could show a direct line from a campaign to revenue, not just an open rate. Track cost per campaign against the sales it generated and report that number, plainly, every month.

None of this required a big team or a big budget, which was the whole point. In a year when most marketing channels were getting more expensive and less reliable, a disciplined email program was one of the few that got cheaper the more you invested in doing it properly.