Buzz words in job requirement - Email marketing

After searching for job days and days online, I have to say some employers are really obsessed with certain buzz words. I really doubt these are fundamental skill sets. In the following blogger, I'm going to list some of them and show my thoughts about them.

buzz word 1: email marketing

First of all, I didn't know what email marketing is before job searching. Here is the paragraph to describe it in Wikipedia.

Email marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fund-raising messages to an audience. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

• sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers, to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,
• sending email messages with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,
• adding advertisements to email messages sent by other companies to their customers, and
• sending email messages over the Internet, as email did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network email and FIDO).

OK. it's just a method of direct marketing. We receive spam email everyday with unrelated products. It's simple. What should we care if we need to do email marketing? 1. Selected customer. 2. Proper contents.

For the first one, targeting the right customer with the right product is always the key to lots of marketing/sales approach. Sending an email to irrelevant customers might cost the company little, but it could damage brand/image of the company.

For the second one, contents could be proper products/promotion. It still relates to customer selection. In addition, if the link for purchasing is provided in the email, success rate of the email marketing can be evaluated easily.

In essence, email marketing reflects three aspects, customer selection, customized promotion and close loop marketing. I feel that's the fundamental of email marketing. That should be areas employers care.

One example I think about is Groupon, which might be considered as an successful example of email marketing. But uniqueness of Groupon is that it matches local demand (customers in certain city) and local supply (sellers in certain city). Geo info is a very good filter for customer selection. Now Groupon has lots of copycat. We can see daily special of Expedia, but I really doubt that would be successful.