I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?
Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?
The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?
And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?
So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!
Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.
With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.
Okay, that might be a bit harsh. Perhaps the resolution should be: “I resolve to stop and take a breath before hitting the ‘Send’ button.” Maybe it is because we all spent a bit too much time in that strange place called Christmasland during December but there were some very high (and a lot of very low) profile errors during December that could have been easily avoided.
Starting with the high profile, the New York Times accidentally offered more than 8.6 million people a half-price subscription in an email meant for a few hundred, because they sent it to the wrong list (http://bit.ly/uHerov). It is one thing to send an email to the wrong list when it is about the same size as the one intended, but to be off by a factor of 10,000…!
Another much lower profile (in the sense that The Guardian did not write an article about it) but potentially just as damaging case occurred to a client who sent an email with some broken links and images. After the obligatory call to both Support and his account manager, we discovered that the client had sent a test message. Now you are probably asking yourself what we asked the client: “If you noticed that the links and images were broken in the test message, why did you send the email to your customers?” The answer was delivered without embarrassment or acknowledgement of the obvious: “We were under time pressure to get it out.”
So, for 2012 I ask all email marketers to do the following before each email Send:
- Ask a colleague who did not help you write the email to proofread it. If a colleague is not available, use spouses, partners, the postman, or even English-speaking baristas.
- Send a test message to a number of accounts on a number of platforms.
- Go into each test message and make sure it looks as you intended.
- On one of the test messages click on all of the links and make sure they go to the page you intended.
- Think about the list you are going to use for the campaign and without looking at it write down the number of people you expect to receive the email on a piece of paper. This part is important because by writing it down, you will be less tempted to look at the number and convince yourself that it is right and you are wrong.
- Now look at the stats for the list; are the numbers similar?
- If you really want to be sure, pull a couple of random recipients out of the list to see if based on your segmentation you would expect them to receive the email.
- Go make a cup of tea to give your brain a few minutes to catch your pending mistake.
- Send your email.
I should also add that you should make sure you monitor the stats for your campaign while it runs its natural course but that is probably a separate resolution.
On Tuesday 22nd November the DMA held its final breakfast seminar in the Email Customer Lifecycle Series, this time focussing on Win-Back. With over 80 delegates the seminar hosted keynotes from sponsors eDialog and a casestudy from Screwfix, as well as presentations from Tim Watson, Gianfranco Cuzziol and James Beauchamp.
Customer Win-Back – Protecting and Reviving Customer Engagement – Jill Brittlebank, Director of Strategic Services.
Approximately ¾ of your emails are going unread and communications through multiple channels are increasing, so how important is email really? In a survey to marketers by eDialog it was found that email ranked second (by 1%) to SEO as an excellent channel for ROI. Email has been consistently the top or second top channel for ROI since 2008. If ¾ of your emails are going unread, how do you define an inactive customer in a multi channel world and what role does email have in the purchase lifecycle of a customer.
Quick takeaways:-
- Once you understand the role of email in the purchase funnel for your customer segments, then you can improve the content of the emails you send to become more effective.
- Someone who is actively opening & clicking, even though not purchasing in the last year should be seen as active.
- The four types of Win-Back scenarios
- Prevention is better than cure – keep it relevant
- The 6 factors of relevance
- Remember that if email isn’t the channel of choice give the customer another choice of channel
- Remember the ROI – it might be time for goodbye!
o Reactivating inactive subscribers
o Reactivating lapsed purchasers
o Dealing with unsubscribes
o Dealing with invalid emails
o Segmentation
o Personalisation
o Lifecycle management
o Contact Management
o Interactivity
o Testing and Measurement
Re-lighting the flame – Tim Watson, Emailvision
The objectives of a win back program are to increase revenue, avoid deliverability issues and gain insight for causes for disengagement.
Key takeaways:-
- Identify your in-actives, learn how to separate the in-active and valuable from the truly inactive
- Remember that users don’t always respond with a click. Research from the DMA Email Tracking Study 2011 shows that many people actually go to the company’s website outside of the email.
- The time period of an inactive depends on your business
- A win back strategy can include the following steps
- If the message isn’t working then change it! Use incentives, but don’t oversell
o Phase 1 – Insight survey
o Phase 2a – Win back
o Phase 2b – Win back follow up
Keeping the flame burning – Email strategies to present losing a customer – Gianfranco Cuzziol
There are 3 key areas in keeping the email flame alive, they are sign-up, relevance and unsubscribe.
Key takeaways:-
- The sign up is very important at the start of your relationship with the consumer. Manage expectations, say thank you and make the process simple.
- Relevance is key in keeping the relationship burning.
- Define inactive. Were they ever active? Did they come from a competition? Did they ever get your emails? Check your inbox placement
- Remember nothing lasts forever – think about the natural lifecycle of your consumer
- Content and context are key
- Audit what device your customers are viewing your emails on, optimise your HTML accordingly
- Understand why the customer will unsubscribe, ask for feedback, offer to change frequency, offer another channel
Tested email strategies to win-back. The simple bare necessities – Susan Young, Screwfix
The four key areas for Screwfix win back strategies are Definition – Timescale – Relevancy – Messaging.
Key take aways
- Identify what defines a non active
- Define timescales – when is the right time to speak to your inactives
- How will you be relevant to all your inactives? Use geo targeting to enhance relevancy
- What messaging will you use – “We are sorry…” “What did we do to upset you..” “We’ve changed..”
- Start with the basics:-
o Segment your database into active & inactive
o Test timescales – 9mnths vs 12mnths etc
o Test relevancy/incentives
o Test messaging
o Test subject lines!
Win-back Campaign Examples – James Beauchamp, eDialog
James highlighted win back campaign examples from various brands including TJ-Maxx, Confused.com, British Airways and Dell.
Key take aways:-
- Who are our target audience?
- What is the desired response?
- What do we know about our in-actives?
- What else can we learn?
- What is in it for our subscribers?
- What happens after win-back?
In summary when planning a winback/reengagement strategy it is important to remember a few key points:-
- Identify and define an inactive dependent on your business. Understand the natural churn of customers
- Define your goals
- Think about the nudge affect of your emails on the customer, some people don’t respond with a click
- Learn from those who are inactive and why they have become so. Use this information to drive further strategy
- Test different creatives/subject lines/offers/content
- Remember that the more relevant your emails are earlier in the lifecycle the less inactives you will have
- Define a strategy for those you have won back and those who have remained inactive
Today’s event was a great end to the Email Customer Lifecycle series for this year. Next year the DMA will be bringing you this great series of events again, kicking off in April with “List Growth”. Thank you to all those who have contributed over this year to bring us some great insights, research, top tips and case studies on developing and strengthening our email customer lifecycle journey strategies. We look forward to seeing you all again in the New Year.
Every year we make them, but only occasionally do we keep them. New Year’s resolutions often represent our best intentions, which somehow get sidetracked as “real” life takes over and our time becomes filled with ticking items off “to do” lists and trying to keep our heads above water.
If you’re an email marketer, the same often holds true for the more strategic items on your list, which can be overlooked in an effort to get the next email out the door. However, as one of Return Path’s executives is known for saying, hope is not a strategy. Just wanting something to change doesn’t make it so. When thinking about the New Year’s resolutions you’d make for your email program in 2012, I recommend creating a realistic plan for sticking to these:
- I will make time to test. This is a fundamental and essential best practice for any email marketer to follow. Without a testing plan, you simply won’t know the levers to pull to positively impact your email program’s performance. Instead, you’re just guessing as to what works, what doesn’t, what resonates and what misses the mark. Start by regularly testing the most basic email program elements with an A/B split test, like subject lines, and work your way up to multivariate testing of creative elements, like images, calls-to-action and landing pages.
- I will define (and track) metrics to measure performance. What metrics are most important for measuring email program success? For most marketers this includes some combination of deliverability, open, click-through and conversion rates, but depending on your business model, your subscriber base and the desired responses you’re looking to generate from the email channel (i.e., purchases, leads, downloads, web traffic, etc.), creating a customized list of KPIs is essential for measuring trends over time. I continue to be amazed by the number of companies I come in contact with that are blindly sending email without any capabilities for tracking response rates.
- I will be more focused on engagement. An email’s primary purpose is to drive an action. This can be anything from getting a subscriber to read what’s in an email, take a survey or walk them through a multi-step purchase process. But what about inactivity? Chances are you have a reasonably high percentage of subscribers who were once engaged and interacting with your messages, but have lost interest over time. These subscribers are likely deleting your messages without reading them or have set up rules to automatically route your messages to an “unimportant” folder, like in Gmail’s priority inbox. So what changed, when did it happen and, most importantly, why? Understanding what keeps your subscribers engaged over the long-term will be increasingly important for getting delivered to the inbox, staying there and maintaining high levels of activity.
- I will reengage with my inactives. This is the next logical step. Stop focusing on list quantity and concern yourself with its quality. The health of your email program depends on it. Inactives can represent everything from true spam traps, recycled email addresses and unknown users to subscribers who once found your emails relevant and no longer do. Take action and remove the less than clean segments of your list that represent bad data or old data and create a strategy for reengaging with existing subscribers who are still valuable to your business.
- I will monitor the competition. Standing out from the inbox clutter will continue to be a challenge as the volume of email increases, and this includes differentiating your brand and value proposition from your competitors. If your competition is incorporating features like geo-targeting, real-time inventory updates, offer count-downs in real-time, customized content and personalization elements into their email messages, what effect will that have on revenue and engagement, and how can you stay one step ahead? These insights are key as brands compete for subscriber mind-share in a crowded and increasingly mobile inbox.
As the saying goes, “even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” However, committing to at least some of these New Year’s resolutions will ensure your email program is set up for success in 2012 and beyond. So, let’s toast to that!
Early this year the DMA’s Legal and Best Practice hub and I published a whitepaper on Email Creative. It was never meant as a definitive guide to creating great email campaigns but more a collection of ideas to consider during the design process. The world of email is constantly changing both from the sender and the recipient’s perspective and as such we always need to be adapting how we design our emails for the best results. A template that worked well last Christmas may not achieve the same results this year, although that may not all be down to the creative.
The way in which people read their emails has evolved. New browsers, desktop clients and mobile devices are always being released along with upgrades to existing readers. Subtle changes can make a big difference in way your email is received by your audience. Since Apple launched the iPad the tablet market has rocketed and more people than ever are reading their email on a tablet. Why carry your laptop when you are travelling when a lightweight tablet will do the trick ?
We are seeing more evidence that the first open for many emails is on a mobile device. This may not be the only device they view the email on but could be the most important. Whether they can delete your email from their mobile device and never see it again or whether it will still be in their inbox on their desktop really depends on their email setup. In the B2C marketplace many users will only ever read their email on a mobile device and might never access their email from a desktop.
It’s also worth remembering that the timing of your emails can greatly affect the device used to read it as well as the length of time you have to grab the recipients attention. An email sent early in the morning might catch people on the way to work. They could be on a bus/tram/train and reading their emails on a mobile device. The chances are they have more time to read emails that might normally just get deleted if it were to arrive in their inbox on their desktop.
You can use historical data to get a good overview of how your recipients are reading your emails and what tools they are using. This will give you a better idea on which areas to focus your attention when designing your email.
In the past ISP’s have been keen to limit what you can do within the content of an email in an attempt to give the user increased confidence about their inbox security. Now users are demanding more functionality in their emails and ISP’s such as Hotmail and Yahoo are expanding what you can do. Hotmail has Active Views and dynamic content is the next step. Embedded video in email is now also a real possibility. This new functionality can really enhance your email but to use it you need to have a clear understand of who your audience are.
Having said all this, some of the principle of good email creative will always be the same.
1. Test ! Test ! and Test again
Decide on what you want to achieve from the campaign and using these metrics to create a testing plan to get the best from your campaign. Use split testing to compare different options.
2. Design and Content
Think about the images you use and keep your calls to action clear even when images aren’t displayed. Validate your html to make sure there are no mistakes.
3. Rendering
Preview your email in as many different clients as possible focusing on the clients you expect your clients to be using. You want to give the recipient the best possible experience whether on desktop or mobile.
4. Personalisation
The aim of personalising a message is to demonstrate you know and understand enough about the recipient and their interests to have deduced that your email is relevant to them.
5. Relevance
Segment your data to make the content more relevant to the indiviual. Take a look at the DMA whitepaper The Guide to Segmenting your Emails.
A couple of weeks ago, before I flew to the States and entered into a turkey-induced coma, I shared with you some thoughts on five ways email marketing is thriving in a “mocial” world. Well, as we all well know “thriving” doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges or effort. So, in that vein, here’s a look at five key challenges email marketing faces to stay relevant in a world intertwined with mobile, social and local marketing.
1. Focus on Deepening Relationships. The most savvy email marketers are adopting the long-held belief that email marketing is best suited as a relationship medium. Email programmes today are about adding more depth to customer relationships and expanding connections that already exist with the brand. Use social media to create buzz and expand brand awareness. Use email to carry that first interest through the customer life cycle.
2. Design and Test for Multiple Devices. Email marketers face a design and testing conundrum with a myriad of new devices on the market. In fact, by the close of 2011, more than forty new tablet devices will have been introduced to the global market. Email marketers need to make sure their messages are not only readable across of these different platforms and devices, but optimised for that experience.
3. Trigger Messages Based on Behaviour. Focusing on triggered and transactional communications allows email marketing to deliver an experience that can never be replicated in social media. Real-time, behaviour-based communications triggered by a purchase, product shipment, event registration, etc. allow email marketers to connect with consumers with relevant information times precisely to the consumers interests.
4. Integrate Well with Mobile and Social. In order for email to thrive in this new world, it cannot live in isolation. Integration with social media for opt-ins is a must. And, design and optimisation for mobile devices is also critical.
5. Concise Messages and Focused Design is Key. Each month it becomes less likely that your email message is being read on a PC with a large, bright 19” display. Not only because Apple’s market share is growing along with monitor sizes – but because consumers and prospects are increasingly using mobile devices to triage and manage their inbox on the move. The content, layout, and design of email messages needs to adapt to be more scannable, actionable, and designed for a touch experience.
The beauty of email marketing is that it never stagnates. Ever. The technology, practices and content strategy behind winning email marketing programmes is continuously evolving, and so long as it does, I believe email marketing has a bright and productive place in the marketing mix. For now, we have a lot of work ahead of us to adapt our programmes to thrive in this new, Mocial world. Let’s get started.
If we open an email it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re engaging with the message or the brand. That’s why it takes more than open and click rates to measure subscriber engagement, as Dr David Chaffey points out.
As the year draws to a close, James Bunting does a spot of crystal ball gazing for us email marketers, and it seems the future’s bright.
Email is still the core communication for ASOS. Back in January, I found its email designs lacking, with key messages hidden when images were blocked. ASOS has since totally revamped its designs and is now making the most of all that email has to offer. That’s why it’s this issue’s ‘Campaigns we like’.
But before we say goodbye to 2011, come join David Chaffey and myself at Fusion Marketing Experience where we will be sharing insights and giving master classes on how to improve your marketing efficiency and the all-important ROI.
Kath Pay, editor, Infobox
Co-Founder, Plan to Engage
Like to receive Infobox in your inbox? Then subscribe here
In 2011 a study on how consumers interact with brands via email and social media was commissioned, which reminded me of the importance of digital marketers integrating their marketing channels effectively.
Some key statistics were uncovered by the study, which marketers across Europe can capitalise on to interact and engage with their consumers within their preferred method of communication. Interestingly, of the European countries sampled, (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK), it was the UK that had the highest number of respondents ‘liking’ brands’ Facebook pages with 33%. In total a third of Facebook and Twitter users in the UK ‘like’ brands – more than double the number in the other European countries. In other countries less than 16% of users were signed up as ‘fans’. This highlighted the different levels of engagement with social media across Europe.
Email marketing was found to be the most popular digital channel with an average of 83% of respondents being subscribed to receive newsletters. Respondents from Germany, France and The Netherlands were the most likely to be reachable only via email, whereas in Spain, Italy and the UK, integrated communications, including social media, were the preferred method of communicating with brands. Across all respondents 95% said they check their emails at least once a day and 75% said they use email to receive social network notifications.
For me, the most important issue that marketers need to understand is why people are behaving a certain way via social networks and email, and effectively integrate the two channels to maximise ROI, rather than treating them as separate entities. Only 18% of all consumers said they only use email with the majority preferring to use a combination of channels. The study uncovered that there is currently a large gap between what consumers want and what marketers are delivering.
Due to the extensive amount of information gathered, this infographic has been produced to display all of the information and summarise the key takeaways.
In light of these statistics, are you tailoring your strategy to ensure you are occupying the right channels or driving your consumers to your desired location from the networks they favour?
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