Three years ago, when I began executing e-mail marketing campaigns for companies in Moscow, most of my clients called a newsletter a “spam letter.” The situation was that desperate! Since then, Russia has become more technologically savvy, and my clients wield with ease such concepts and terms as transactional e-mail, click-to-open rate, deliverability, and many more. Russia is undoubtedly following the technological path of the U.S. and Europe, and the market for e-mail marketing is on the eve of a boom.
Spam is dead! Welcome to e-mail marketing
Russia had been notorious for producing gangs of hackers and spammers who flooded U.S. and European inboxes with millions of e-mail offers for Viagra and sex-enhancements. These wrongdoings were executed by a few teams who began facing more and more technological challenges from ISPs, leading Russian webmail services, and local company firewalls, which learned how to increase difficulties for spammers. While teams of e-mail perpetrators persist in Russia, today if you open an account with Russia’s largest webmail provider, Mail.ru, you will receive hardly any spam in your inbox.
Like spam, e-mail marketing populates inboxes with unsolicited offers for products and services—desirable or otherwise. How, then, does it differ from spam? The essential difference is the user permission granted to e-mail marketers. E-mail marketing can be defined as the methods by which websites interact with users who gave their permission through a registration process, be it on the website itself or through partnerships. Spam is unsolicited e-mail sent to users without their permission.
When a person registers to use a website or orders something online, the website informs the person of terms and conditions related to the registration or transaction. It is at this point that a website asks the user’s permission to send e-mail marketing materials.
An underestimated and underused tool
Until recently, most companies operating on Russia’s Internet underestimated or even ignored the e-mail marketing opportunity. They were more concerned about acquiring users than user loyalty. Now their marketing departments have begun to understand that they can generate or stimulate an even higher volume of traffic, not by advertising, but by exploiting the client base that cost them so much to acquire. They are gradually allocating new funds for e-mail marketing personnel and activities—from the communications director who validates the content of messages, to the webmaster and designer who create the layout for the marketing materials, and from the infrastructure used to send 10,000 e-mail items, to the building of relationships with leading Russian webmail services such as Mail.ru, Yandex.ru, and Rambler.ru.
The time has come for companies in Russia to design a real e-mail marketing strategy, be it simply to send a monthly newsletter, a weekly special offer, or a birthday discount or to reactivate a sleeping database.
An underdeveloped supply
Adequate supply for answering these nascent e-mail marketing needs is scarce. Believe it or not, no foreign e-mail marketing company to date has a local office in Russia. Among other reasons, these foreign companies have strong historical prejudices against Russia’s spam practices. Nevertheless, some major international players are considering, at last, opening local offices in Moscow later this year or next year.
(Managing Russian e-mail bases in Russia from abroad is virtually impossible. In Russia, three leading Russian webmail services are responsible for 95% of all webmail—Mail.ru for 70%, Yandex.ru for 15%, and Rambler.ru for 10%. This heavy concentration of same-domain e-mail addresses presents formidable challenges for companies owning and managing B-to-C e-mail addresses. Not only does it impact the level of sophistication required by the sending platform, it also necessitates a local presence to manage technical issues that arise daily in e-mail campaigns. Because of these issues, any company owning a million B-to-C e-mail addresses should not get blacklisted by a webmail service while sending a newsletter.)
If you look at e-mail brokers, you find nothing—or at least nothing legal and serious.
No local companies maintain highly specialized opt-in lists and offer to send qualified information to targeted and permitted user groups. Again, you may find individuals trying to sell stolen e-mail databases that they have already sold 10 times to the companies that made the best offers, but such a practice is hardly viable. Above all, it’s forbidden by the law—even in Russia!
Another issue is the lack of e-mail marketing professionals. Many of my clients have asked me to find such managers, but they are nowhere to be found. I have seen offers posted on hh.ru, a leading HR website in Russia, for months and months that have not collected even one comprehensive reply. To satisfy the demand, I end-up training webmasters or CRM managers in the art of organizing, executing, and measuring e-mail marketing campaigns. To be sure, this shortage of e-mail managers will not last long for because young Internet literates are many and eager to learn, but finding a dedicated, experienced, and available e-mail marketing director is “mission impossible” at the moment.
In this desert, a few companies do grow.
Two service providers of e-mail marketing, Intelligent Emails and UniSender, help their clients manage and develop their client base.
Subscribe.ru and Maillist.ru, owned by advertising agency Agava, offer mailing list services. These companies have millions of subscribers to a variety of thematic newsletters through which brands can reach targeted groups. A similar newsletter offer is proposed by Mail.ru, a leading Russian Internet portal and webmail provider. With 20 themes and even more sub-themes, Mail.ru sends approximately 12 million e-mail items each day. The company, however, has no e-mailing offer in the strict meaning.
