Tailoring your content according to what you know about subscribers can boost response. Here’s what you need to know…

What’s the difference between dynamic content and personalisation?

The difference lies in how the email is built. Personalisation inserts data that is held in your database directly into the content of your email. Dynamic content, on the other hand, is where blocks of tailored content hosted by you or your ESP are inserted according to specific rules set by you.

Give me some examples

For a personalised campaign, you might include details such as your subscriber’s name, address, date of birth – any data that you hold, in the format in which it’s stored – so long as it’s relevant or adds value to your message.

Using dynamic content, meanwhile, you might opt to send different content elements to different subscriber groups that meet certain criteria such as:

• interests: a DIY store might send one content element to customers who browsed garden  furniture, and something different to those that browsed soft furnishings
• geography an international campaign might send content in different languages to users in different countries
• gender you might send one image to males, and a different image to females
• customer type for instance, sending high-value offers to big spenders and lower-value deals to lower-spending customers

Personalisation? Don’t people see through that “Dear <First Name>” stuff nowadays?

It’s true that simply personalising a message with a user’s name doesn’t have the impact it once did. Any message that just tops a completely generic message with a user name is likely to disappoint, and consumers are wary of supposedly personalised messages that turn out to be spam.

However, with a little lateral thinking, there are lots of easy ways to use personalisation to improve campaign performance such as:

• add credibility to welcome messages by including the source of the registration you’re confirming or
• include the Account Manager’s name or signature in B2B campaigns.

Better still, many platforms also enable you to set up dynamic personalisation – enabling you to build rules around personalisation. This gives you some of the advantages of dynamic content without the complexity, such as a rule like: “if ‘first name’ blank, use ‘customer’”.

Isn’t creating dynamic content very complicated?

If you haven’t created dynamic campaigns before, your first campaign can seem complicated, but the effort is well worth it: dynamic campaigns can save you significant amounts of time and resource in the long run.

Once you have your rules set up, you can often save them for future use, making ongoing dynamic campaigns only slightly more time consuming to set up and test.

To get you started, follow these steps:

• Create a test list with internal contacts or seed addresses with data that mirrors the data you hold for your subscribers. Then have a play with your platform.
• Start off simply with live data. Use just one dynamic content segment and a couple of rules, then you can build on your campaign’s complexity from there.
• Consider outsourcing the set-up and deployment of dynamic campaigns, so freeing you up to spend more time on generating content and strategies for future campaigns.

Checklist for developing campaigns with tailored content

Personalisation and dynamic content can provide a significant uplift to your campaign performance when done well; get it wrong, however, and you can harm your brand and reputation. Here’s what you need to get right:

• Check the quality of your data – are all fields complete and accurate?
• Make sure you’ve thought through the logic properly, and specify default values where appropriate.
• Test your campaigns thoroughly. With some ESPs you can test before deployment using live data; otherwise, create some dummy data and generate a test mailing to that list before your final deployment.
• Check your hosted version: whether personalisation or dynamic content carry through to your hosted version will depend on your platform.
• Find out what reporting is available for dynamic/personalised campaigns. Even if your platform cannot report on the performance of different content segments, you should still be able to run reports offline, though this will incur additional time and resource.
• Don’t personalise for the sake of it: only include information that is relevant and valuable to subscribers
• Always test the performance of your personalised campaigns against less targeted campaigns: sometimes broad offerings will generate unexpected sales, after all the fact a customer is male does not preclude them from buying a dress for a friend, relation or even for themselves.

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Sometimes in the midst of all the amazing advanced email technology available to marketers, the essential building blocks in email are overlooked or not maximised.

I regularly remind marketers to go back and check that all the building blocks are in place in order to have a firm infrastructure to have the data to use the technology available at their finger tips. Data is the key to your success, and allows you to achieve those sophisticated aims and goals such as personalisation, segmentation and triggered and life cycle mailings.

With that in mind, I point to the subscribe form – an excellent cost-effective way to build an in-house database of pre-qualified leads.

1. Create a subscribe (or opt-in) form that attracts sign-ups. Include details of what you will send, how often, a link to a sample issue and your privacy policy. Include carefully selected non-required fields that will help you understand where the lead is in the sales cycle so you can provide better content. Plan to test it too, just as you would a landing page.
2. Start by placing the form prominently throughout your company’s website. Place it as part of any other forms you have on your website.
3. Include a link to the subscribe form in each issue of your email newsletter.
4. Put the information on your business card. Also, when you meet someone through networking or business meetings ask them if they’d like to receive your newsletter and sign them up. Follow up immediately with a welcome message reminding them why they will be receiving it.
5. Have a “forward to a friend” function in your emails – and don’t forget to have a link to your sign up form as well!
6. Put that link in all your social networking profiles. When you send a newsletter, publish its link to your streams, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
7. Create an email address specifically for signing up to the newsletter. Use it in all your printed material (e.g. bills, invoices or statements) – include it in your hold and voicemail messages.
8. cross promote the newsletter through direct marketing material, as well as offline and online advertising.
9. Have a signup sheet available at your trade shows stands. Also have a sign up form at reception.
10. Use direct mail – if you only have physical addresses for your leads and/or customers, send them a direct mail with information on how to sign up to your emails.

denise cox is the Email Communications Specialist for Newsweaver. You can follow her on Twitter @denisecox

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If you’re anything like me, then you’ll have been glued to the TV over the last month or so watching some of the greatest footballers in the world compete for that all important prize. But even if I hadn’t watched any of the World Cup, I’d only have to look at my inbox to know exactly what was going on.

That’s because over the last few weeks it seems as though every company under the sun has taken the opportunity to bombard its recipients with emails that ‘newsjack’ off the competition.

It’s a tried and tested marketing strategy and no doubt one that works very well for many companies. And yet, I can’t help but think that for some, the knee-jerk reaction to piggyback off the success of something happening out there in the wider world could be doing more bad than good.

Last week, we looked at a bunch of these World Cup emails that had come through and picked out a couple of the better ones. If there was one thing that really stood out, it was that some of the companies had obviously put a great deal of thought, care and attention behind their seasonal campaigns.

Don’t forget to target

The campaigns that were most successful were the ones that had clearly put in a great deal of advanced planning. Figleaves, for example, had launched a range of ‘England’ knickers – called Britnix! – a product that clearly suited its target audience while making the most of the World Cup.

And this really is the key point to remember when running campaigns like these. While it is tempting to jump on the bandwagon, it’s vital to hold onto all those tried and tested email marketing best practices. The central one of these, as demonstrated by Figleaves, is targeting.  It’s only by targeting the email effectively that you will actually reach a recipient that is engaged and ready to interact with your message. And they will only do this if the seasonal event is of interest and relevant to them.

Tink is Managing Director at dotMailer. He blogs on the dotDigital Blog and you can also follow him on Twitter: @tinktaylor

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One of the more unlikely celebrities to emerge from the recently completed football World Cup was Paul the Octopus. For those of you who are unaware of the background to this story, Paul lives in an aquarium in Germany, and has become an expert predictor of the results of the matches that feature Germany ( as well as correctly calling Spain as the winners of the final ). To assist Paul with the making of his predictions, aquarium staff would provide him with two clear boxes, with each having the flag of one of the competing teams affixed to its side, and a tasty titbit inside in the form of a mussel or an oyster. Whichever box Paul climbed into was treated as being his selection, and incredibly he ended the World Cup with a 100% success record.

I got to thinking that Paul’s predictions have a lot in common with email marketing. Think about it :

• There are differing outcomes associated with whichever box you ultimately end up in !
  When Paul correctly predicted that Germany would lose to Spain in the semi-finals, German fans called for him to be cooked and eaten, while the Spanish prime minister jokingly offered to provide him with protection.

  Similarly, “inbox placement” is now widely regarded as a more accurate campaign metric than “delivered rate”. Campaign responses are markedly higher when the emails are getting delivered to a location where they will be seen, and responded to. E-marketers need to be challenging their ESPs to provide them with the reporting capabilities to see whether this is an issue that is affecting their programs. And if so, to implement the best practices that improves their inbox placement performance.

• Recognition plays an important role in delivering a positive outcome !
  One theory about Paul’s astonishing success rate was that Octopuses, which are highly intelligent creatures, can differentiate between shapes ( apparently with a preference for rectangles ! ) as well as between contrasts in brightness. The German flag, which he chose 5 times, was therefore an obvious choice for him, except when presented with the even greater contrasts that were represented by the stripes of the Serbian and Spanish flags.

  Similarly, the typical inbox is a massively congested space right now, and consumers are more likely to respond to marketing emails when they immediately recognise the sender. E-marketers need to be careful to ensure that they maintain a consistent “friendly from” and that the subject line clearly explains why the email is worth opening. And with many recipients using some format of preview pane, making sure that this limited amount of real estate is able to effectively convey the sender’s brand and call to action.

• A good incentive is more likely to achieve the response that you are looking for !While Paul’s psychic capabilities are undeniably phenomenal, it is unlikely that he would have displayed them without the incentive of the mussel that was place in each box. Octopuses are equipped with sensitive chemo receptors on their tentacles and Paul, knowing that there was a tasty treat inside the boxes, was eager to engage.

  Similarly, consumers are more likely to respond when they consider that a fair exchange of value is taking place. This doesn’t necessarily need to be in the form of a prize or a free giveaway either. Good content carries a value ( think moneysavingexpert.com ) and consumers will respond more readily to marketing emails that they think that they will benefit from. Email marketers will be rewarded by the application of even simple profiling and segmentation against their marketing audience so that they can consistently apply the marketing mantra of “right target, right message, right time.”

So what else does Paul the Octopus have in common with email marketing ? Cynics may respond that it is a case of having a highly intelligent brain at the centre of operations, which is attempting to control the behaviour of thousands of suckers, and sometimes coming unstuck in the pursuit of a few more squid !

However, I would prefer to tip my hat to Ringo Starr, who wrote Octopus’s Garden for The Beatles, after eating octopus for dinner, and learning from the ship’s captain that they travel along the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects with which to build gardens. So the octopus analogy is with something that creates value without necessarily having an ulterior motive, that can take many different forms, that populates a variety of different channels, and that ultimately is capable of leaving a good taste in your mouth – just like well run email marketing program !

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The innovative guys over at Litmus have extended their Fingerprint tool and added some pretty amazing email analytics to their tool. They tracked more than 4 million opens over hundreds of campaigns and found some interesting results. Out of those who opened the campaigns:

•On average, 51.1% of readers spend less than 2 seconds looking at your email
•In the best email campaigns, 77% of people fully read the message
•On average, 0.12% of readers printed the email
•On average, 0.63% of readers forwarded the email using their email client, not the ‘forward to a friend’ tool.

By simply adding some code to your email you can see whether they read, skimmed or deleted your email, as well as which email client they used. You can also see if they’ve forwarded (natural) or printed your email.

To be honest, I’m pretty excited at the thought of what can be done with these kind of analytics from my campaigns – ideal for continual testing and optimising. What an amazing marketing channel email is – to enable you to get metrics such as these!

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Understanding why consumers are quick to withdraw the privilege of using their data for marketing purposes is not terribly complicated. However, the factors that lead consumers to entrust their data with companies in the first place, and how companies continue to retain the confidence of these consumers, are not immediately obvious. To close this knowledge gap, the inaugural DMA / fast.MAP Data Tracking Study provides an in depth analysis of why consumers share their details with brands. It also takes a look at the details they’re willing to share and what secures their confidence that the data holder is capable of storing their information safely and using it correctly.

According to the findings of the report, simple trust in the brand is by far the most compelling reason that consumers cite for their willingness to handover their details. Having a relationship of sorts with the customer also matters, as does providing a service the consumer regards as essential. People are most willing to share a broad range of details when buying products online than under any other circumstances.

Consumers are now fully aware of the value and vulnerability of their data – a fact which all too many brands have ignored at their cost. The biannual Data Tracking Study provides fascinating insight into what consumers think we are doing right and what we are doing wrong in using their data for marketing purposes.

The Data Tracking Study can be downloaded from www.dma.org.uk/research
(DMA Members only)

This month’s issue

In this month’s Infobox our lead author, David Hughes of The Email Academy addresses the concerns he has regarding marketers relying on ‘open rates’ as a valid measure of success of a campaign; News International’s Rupert Harrison assesses the future for cold email lists; Sara Watts of Data Media And Research looks at why claims made by some companies selling third-party data aren’t always what they seem; Skip Fidura of dotAgency tells us why he likes US shoe brand Teva’s Waterkeeper Alliance campaign; and in this month’s special report for DMA members’ eyes only, we take you through 10 ways to integrate your email marketing and social media.

It’s time to get tough on open rates, David Hughes, The Email Academy
Is there a future for email list rental? Rupert Harrison, News International
Third-party list rental: does size really matter? Sara Watts, Data Media and Research
Campaigns we like: Teva’s Waterkeeper Alliance. Skip Fidura, dotAgency
Special report: 10 Ways to Integrate Email Marketing & Social Media (DMA Members only)

Read the full issue

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We all talk about the power of email marketing, but it really comes home to roost where you’re on the end of a bad experience.

Let me set the scene. With summer on the way I decided to buy some plants for my garden. I chose a company I’d never bought from before but had the recommendation badge from a leading horticultural organisation. At first I had good service, they delivered quickly, but the problems arose with my second order. My second order was left on my doorstep and whilst the box clearly said ‘do not tip’, the delivery company had left it on its side resulting in six of my nine plants being damaged.

I went to the website of the company I bought them from and the only way I could get in contact was through completing their website form (not a good start). There wasn’t an email address for them anywhere. So I sent off my complaint and waited and waited. In fact I waited one week and heard nothing even though their website said they would get back to me within two working days.

I did some more digging around and found an email address hidden on the receipt I’d had for the order, so I sent off another complaint and waited and waited. In the intervening time I received an email from one of their other businesses offering me incontinence products. Signing up for emails from the gardening business and get emails from the incontinence business. I was not impressed.

Four days later I sent my complaint email again. This time I had a response and was pleased with how they coped with it. They were mortified and offered to refund the plants that were damaged, so I responded reminding them that six had been damaged. Sadly I’ve heard nothing since and whilst I’ve emailed I’m a little lost and disappointed that having chased and chased and chased communication has fallen off a cliff.

Email marketing is a powerful communication tool. It can build positive customer experiences and long standing relationships. However, it can also destroy them very quickly. Use it wisely.

Jonathan Burston, Director

Customer Solutions Group, CACI

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You may recall last week we started looking at testing and my recommendation of ten mistakes to avoid. Well this week I am going to continue with this theme and look at the remaining 5 mistakes that we should all look to avoid with our testing.

However before we get started, lets take a second to remind ourselves of the five mistakes we discussed last week:-

• Mistake 1 – Not Testing At All
• Mistake 2 – Not focusing testing on the big things that are going to make a difference
• Mistake 3 – Not having a hypothesis to prove
• Mistake 4 – Not testing with a robust data sample
• Mistake 5 – Forgetting to keep a control group

Mistake 6:- Don’t draw your conclusion too quickly
Because we are often working against the clock, it is easy to fall into the mistake of drawing a conclusion from test results too quickly and deciding to use a particular subject line because it generated the best open rates within the first 6 hours of an email being sent.

This is a mistake because often the people who open the email quickly are the ones who will always open your emails.  If you were looking to increase open rates this is going to come by engaging those people who don’t typically open your email.  Allowing enough time between conducting the test and analysing the results is crucial to improving understanding.

Mistake 7:- Don’t forget to measure and use what you are testing
I feel almost stupid writing about this mistake as it does sound ridiculous that people would test but not measure success, but I have seen it happen.  Without having agreed metrics to measure your test against it is impossible to determine the results of the test and therefore draw any conclusions for the future.

The other common mistake along the same lines is to conduct a test and then forget to share or use the knowledge in the future.  Either not building what you have learnt into future campaigns or using the knowledge gained but failing to document why.  I have spoken to businesses that send their messages at 10:00 on a Friday morning because they tested it, but don’t now have access to the results to support that decision.

Mistake 8:- Testing too many elements at once
When you want to make big improvements to your email activity quickly it can be useful to test different elements at the same time.  This has the positive effect of dramatically changing the results of your campaigns.  One word of caution however is to not make the mistake of testing too many different elements in one go.  This is a mistake as it often incredibly time consuming or impossible to then work out what elements of the test were successful and what elements weren’t.  In essence although you have improved results, you don’t have the knowledge to help you understand your audience and inform future campaigns.

Mistake 9:- Allowing technology to determine success
I am aware that many technology systems will run a test and automatically send emails to the remaining recipients based on agreed success criteria.  This saves you the trouble of logging in to check the results, but it is a mistake.  Only you can really understand what has been learnt from the test and decide on the right approach for the future.  As an example, the subject line with the highest open rate might be determined to be the most successful, but this doesn’t necessarily take into account the fact that the other subject line generated greater click through rates and conversion levels or that the first subject line also created a lot more questions or complaints.

It can be a big mistake to not take the time to determine the results of the test yourself.

Mistake 10:- Don’t forget to transfer the insights from testing to other marketing channels
It is easy to think that the results of testing an email are specific to the email channel, however this is a mistake.  How a recipient interacts with your email will tell you a lot about what they are interested in and how they feel about your business and brand.

I would always urge marketers to share the insights that they learn from their email testing and apply it to the other marketing channels that they operate.  For instance, using subject line test results to inform pay per click bidding, or the layout of your email to inform the content of a landing page or printed catalogue.  It can be a mistake not to share your email insights across the other marketing channels.

Testing is an incredibly important part of any email program and should be scheduled as part of any marketers email activity.  Avoiding the mistakes made above will help to improve the value of your testing and therefore email activity even further.  It would be great to hear about other readers testing experiences (good and bad), so please let me know yours.

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