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.

Welcome to the January 2010 issue of Infobox. We have now set foot in what is ostensibly the email marketing industry’s second decade of existence. As we entered the new millennium, few could have predicted just how email would quickly evolve to become one of the preeminent marketing channels. Technological developments aside, what has been most impressive is how sophisticated the medium has become in such a short period of time. What the digital world will look like ten years hence is anyone’s guess, but I’m confident that the next decade will see email marketing continue to be at the forefront of marketing innovation.

This month, Infobox features articles on how the ’spray and pray’ approach used by some email marketers needs to be retired and make way for the three Ts: tailored, targeted, timely; taking a level-headed approach to integrating email  with social media marketing; and a case study on how Apple uses email to effectively up- and cross-sell.

Don’t forget that we’d also like to see you in the real world at our series of Email Customer Lifecycle seminars during 2010. On 3 March, we’ll be looking at conversion – how to earn that click and open and drive revenue. Tickets for the first Lifecycle sold out, so to guarantee your seat today, please make your booking here.

The 3 T’s – Tailored, Targeted, Timely by Jonathan Burston

Email as a social stepping stone by Simone Barratt

Campaigns we like: Apple by Tink Taylor

Read the full issue of Infobox here

 The wintry weather has given us all plenty of un-expected “down-time”, whether waiting in hope on snowy station platforms or huddled around an open fire with our families. Rather than succumb to the clutches of Cabin Fever I have been thinking about the “big wins” that treating customers differently delivers email marketers. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for treating people differently to reflect their unique registration, transaction and click-stream profiles.

Acquisition tools – if you’re renting data, ask the list owner what variables they hold and then deliver different versions of the same message. For BtoB that should be different subject lines, opening paragraphs and calls to action based on “job function” or “industry sector”. For consumers you may know their lifestyle and affluence from geo-demographic variables that list owners like Acxiom hold…have different propositions for less affluent and older prospects or use a different creative for young professionals. Let you imagination run free!

Conversion - as digital marketers we sit on the most valuable real-time prospect data so let’s use it. Who clicked on an email link but did not complete a successful outcome? Who looked at deep product pages on your site but did not buy? These re-marketing campaigns should deliver 4-16 better conversion rates than one-size-fits-all messages so start building them.

Retention – send different message programmes to your newer customers, or have a different tone of voice for purchasers of specific products. Build “personas” to help with your tone of voice, imagery and calls to action.

Re-activation – how do you know when you’ve lost a customer? Probably when they’ve not bought for a specific time period. So develop a “win back” programme with the first message triggered by a “date of last purchase is more than 60 days”. And be relevant…”we’ve noticed that you have not bought from us for a little while….” is a good start.

These are certainly not new or radical ideas, but it is surprising how few campaigns in my in-box are trying to follow these rules. Now that the dust has settled at the end of a demanding 2009, and whilst UK PLC is slumbering in icy grasp of winter, we should be using this precious time to develop relevant, engaging segmentation and personalisation strategies. Happy New Year!

Chris Combemale and David Hughes, Co-founders The Email Academy

When the lead goes cold – what to do with inactive e-mail segments

The festive season is here again and the ‘inbox’ is bursting with invitations and enticing offers from a wide variety of email marketers.  As the number of shopping days diminish and the pace of life, for the consumer, intensifies the easy option for retailers would be to increase email frequency in the hope of achieving the highest return on investment.  However, the intelligent e-marketer knows that by segmenting ‘inactive’ consumers it is possible to highlight where new opportunities lie.

Before considering tactics for inactive segments it is important to define exactly what is meant by ‘inactive’. We live in a multi-channel world where consumers are able to connect with you by many different mediums, so while e-mail, for example, may not be particularly effective they may happily interact with you on any number of others. It is essential to take a holistic view – activity from customers or prospects on other channels should have a direct bearing on your email tactics.

When does inactivity become ‘inactive’?  How dead is dead?

The first question to consider is: how long does a recipient have to be inactive before you officially classify them as ‘inactive’? One company’s ‘inactive’ can be another’s ‘active’. The key criteria for your decision should be an understanding of where a customer is in the buying cycle. If it typically takes your customers 30 days to make a purchase then your definition of inactive will be substantially different from a company that’s buying cycle is 60 days. It may also be appropriate to consider how many different spells of inactivity are required before you officially categorise someone.

On a more technical level, be sure that everyone in your team knows what inactive means to your organisation. Not opened? Not clicked? Not purchased? Most important, though, be sure to double check that the e-mails are actually being delivered in the first place! With careful planning and understanding, it is always possible to predict and prevent inactives in the first place.

Change e-mail content for the inactive segment

Re-engaging inactive customers presents a very convenient opportunity to try new content tactics such as adding interactive elements or experimenting with a new format. The first thing you should do, however, is test new subject lines – any other changes will be irrelevant if recipients don’t open the mail in the first place.

If something new manages to rekindle the interest of a certain percentage of inactive customers, it may be worth testing it against the rest of your e-mail list. Of course, if these changes have no impact, there’s no down side as you haven’t exposed your most faithful and profitable customers to the changes.

Invite inactive customers to update their profile

If an inactive customer hasn’t evaluated her profile in a while, it could well be the reason your e-mails have gone unnoticed. Send an e-mail that encourages inactive customers to review their profile information. Let them know that updating profiles will help you deliver more relevant e-mail. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to re-engage inactive customers with your brand.

Experiment with e-mail test streams and zero frequency

Another option is to suppress the inactive customer list and re-introduce it when a new e-mail communication stream with a compelling offer goes live. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and inactive customers may well be apt to open or click on e-mail when they realise they haven’t heard from you in a while. One test that we conducted recently showed that eight to nine per cent of inactive customers opened or clicked on an e-mail after they were reintroduced into the communication stream.

Survey customers about current e-mail content

It may sound simple but the most effective ideas often are. An e-mail survey to inactive customers can help determine the root of the problem. Did the e-mails they were receiving not meet the customer’s expectations? Was the content not relevant to their interests? Were they receiving emails too often or too infrequently? The answers you receive may allow you to engage inactive customers with an alternative programme, or at least understand what improvements or changes need to be made to current e-mail programmes.

Any of these re-activation programmes can be implemented as a trigger simply by targeting segments that have been inactive for a year, six months, or three months – the earlier the better. As said earlier though, never forget that we live in a multichannel world. If you find that none of these tactics is working, look to contact the individual on another channel – there’s no point in fretting or wasting time if you can quickly determine whether an address is incorrect and really ‘dead’ or simply inactive and a prime opportunity for re-engagement.

Welcome to the November 2009 issue of Infobox. As autumn has well and truly arrived, kick back, warm your hands in the glow of your PC, sip from a mug of hot chocolate and read about the latest news and views from the world of email marketing. This month, Infobox features articles on whether or not the Royal Mail postal strikes will have a positive effect on the email sector; taking a consumer’s eye view at email marketing messages; advice on when to use the word ‘free’ in subject lines; and a review of a recent email marketing campaign that’s impressed us. For DMA members’ eyes only, this month’s special report looks at the effectiveness of using navigation bars in email templates.

Don’t forget that we’d also like to see you in the real world at the first of our four Email Customer Lifecycle seminars. On November 10, we will be addressing tactics for growing your lists with active and engaged subscribers. Tickets are going fast for this free morning seminar in central London. To guarantee your seat today, please make your booking here.

Also, now is your chance to take part in fast.MAP/DMA’s 2009 Marketing GAP study. This vital piece of research measures the gulf between what consumers think of marketing messages and what marketers think they think. Sounds confusing? Well it’s not, and if you take part then you’ll be entered into a prize draw to win £250 for your favourite charity. To start this short survey, please click here.

Our articles this month include:

Postal strike – good or bad news for email marketing? Simon Bowker

Research from my inbox…James Bunting

Free email marketing deliverability advice – when to use ‘FREE’ Chris Combemale

Campaigns we like – Firebox denise cox

In many cases, businesses earn more in the 10 weeks prior to Christmas than the other 42 weeks of the year combined!

Although the busy period may start in late November, customers are already starting to think about what to buy well in advance. Email is a great way to remind them about products and services that are perfect to put under the Christmas tree. But first, in order to sow the seeds for these emails, you need to have a good list!

As an early Christmas gift to all our email marketers, the DMA has partnered with Pure360 to offer a FREE List Growth Email Marketing event to get you started and make your campaigns successful for the holiday season. With an increase in site visits and click through rates throughout December, list growth and capturing good quality data is vital.

Find out how to grow your opt-in list size from the founder of the Email Experience Council Jeanniey Mullen; gain insight into a case study on how Europe’s largest ticket exchange Seatwave built their database; and make sure all your permissions are legal with email legal expert Stephen Groom at our next free event.

Availability is limited and seats are going fast, so make sure you book today!

  A/B split testing is an essential part of any marketer’s tool box and is particularly great for email because it’s quick and easy - however the temptation is to act on results too early.

Typically, A/B split testing is done by isolating two small groups of around 5% of your list and sending them two different creative’s, subject lines or offers. Both campaigns are left until they have generated enough response  in the form of opens, clicks or sales to be statistically representative (this generally takes less than six hours). The best performing creative or subject line is then sent to the rest of the list.  Surely nothing could be simpler?

At Alchemy Worx we’ve found that the best performing cell in the first few hours rarely ends up in the lead at the end of the campaign. So there is a real danger that the version you select will not perform as well as the version you reject! In email split testing, patience really is a virtue.

It’s simple: the longer you leave your analysis, the better your results will be. The people on your list that respond fastest are often not representative of the whole list.

Our advice is to resist the urge to act to soon, no matter how much better the initial response for one version appears to be. Hold off for as long as you can, several days as a minimum – a week if possible and you’ll find email split testing really comes into its own as a device for marketers.

If you would like learn more here is a free guide to A/B split test for email marketers published by Alchemy Worx

The nature of the B2B buyer is fundamentally changing.  And the impact will forever re-align the roles of sales and marketing team members.  This underlies the topic I am going to be covering in my presentation and panel on Thursday at the DMA’s B2B engagement marketing event in London.

It’s also a topic at the core of much dialogue right now among B2B sales and marketing professionals in the marketplace.  So it’s worth digging into the dynamics.

How is the nature of the B2B buyer changing?  And what is the evidence?

At the most fundamental level, we’re seeing a power shift — from B2B vendor to B2B buyer — that is largely fuelled by the proliferation of Internet-available information.  Initially, this information availability benefitted vendors more than buyers, but the explosion of the Web as a forum for buyer social exchange and micro-publishing has overwhelmed vendors.  What has emerged is an asynchronous acceleration of power on the buyer side.

This is probably not new to you, but some of the more granular aspects of this evolution may not be as apparent.  In particular, this power shift has several consequences, as I outlined in a recent post on my Propelling Brands blog. 

B2B buyers:

• Are increasingly turning to online sources, earlier in their process, to research purchases before ever calling a ‘live’ sales rep;

• Are increasingly leveraging social media — especially peer communication, such as Twitter, blogs, etc. — in the information collection phase of the buying process;

• Are pursuing their buying process more ‘massively multi-channel’ than ever before; however, channel weightings and their sequence vary by the phase of the buying process; and

• Manifest themselves more than ever as a complex, savvy ‘buying unit,’ rather than simply as a single decision-maker.

My Propelling Brands post presents a host of research data and insights that supports these points, so I’d check it out.

How should B2B marketers respond?

This shift in the nature of the B2B buyer changes nothing and yet everything.  It has little impact on the core tactics that have defined marketing for decades, and yet it must totally re-align our underlying strategy.

The most important shift is moving from the (artificial) concept of a sales funnel, and instead shifting the alignment of our marketing and sales processes to the buying cycle.  This is something that I outlined in a blog post that summarizes my recent conversation with Meg Heuer, an analyst with SiriusDecisions.  She advocates for a totally buying-cycle-centric mindset.  And she’s right.

I believe the implication for B2B marketers is a re-envisioning of the marketing role.  Rather than thinking about B2B marketing as simply a lead-generation apparatus (and then being frustrated with the differential quality of those leads), marketing must be positioned as the manager of upstream buyer dialogue — via inbound and outbound marketing tactics — and the filter of knowing when a buyer is ready to buy. 

Given sales will not be engaged until later and later in the process — as that is the trend — and buyers will more than ever be shaped by what they see and read online, B2B marketing must take over managing this exchange and driving community participation.  This is critical to shaping early perceptions of buyers and to ensuring your firm is part of their consideration set as they progress through their buying cycle. 

The hand-off of prospects from marketing to sales should consequently be accompanied by an acknowledgement that these prospects are truly in a buying mode (which is known, given upstream dialogue); moreover, marketers must pass along the previous dialogue to the sales team member — to better prepare them for success and to ensure continuity of dialogue. 

A critical element in this new approach is leveraging your marketing automation platform — which shifts from serving as a tactical campaign management system to becoming a strategic dashboard for architecting, managing and monitoring all of your buyer interactions.  And this should serve as the cornerstone for processes and systems that help you scale ‘mass one-on-one conversations’ that ultimately will fuel your sales pipeline.

Want to learn more?  Join us on Thursday at the DMA’s B2B Engagement Email Marketing Conference and participate in the dialogue.

Adam Needles (Twitter: @abneedles) is Director, Field Marketing, and the B2B marketing evangelist for Silverpop.

If you are a B2B marketer, I hope you have booked a seat at the Email Marketing Council’s upcoming event designed specifically with your needs in mind:

B2B engagement email marketing
Date: Thursday, 1 Oct 2009
Time: 9.30am-4.15pm
Venue: Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3NN

In a recent email marketing survey in B2B Marketing magazine (article) respondents confirmed that email (still) gives great ROI. As a result of the continuing high performance of this cost-effective channel, there’s pressure to get even more ROI. This pressure produces challenges. Just two of findings from the survey:

• An increase in fortnightly marketing campaigns over monthly – frequency is now of prime interest to marketers. (Tip: Testing can help find the right frequency balance. Those respondents who did include testing in their process said the insight gained from the results helped increase the effectiveness of their campaigns.)

• Subject lines remained the top variable to test – but there was an increase in the testing of segmentation. (Tip: Segmentation can address the frequency issue by allowing marketers to target and send a campaign to specific subscribers, rather than the entire database.)

I’ll be one of the panellists on the Best Practice panel: denise cox, Newsletter Specialist, Newsweaver; Jenny Moseley, Director, Opt-4; Kath Pay, Managing Director, eInsight; Dela Quist, CEO, Alchemy Worx.

The panel will be moderated by B2B Marketing magazine editor Joel Harrison. We’re a group of experienced email marketers, and plan to bring our varied day-to-day experiences to the debate around challenges faced by marketers in areas such as data acquisition, segmenting and targeting, customers and prospects, setting frequency and opt-in vs. opt-out -in.

Some terrific presentations and panels have been put together to give you maximum takeaways – and I hope to see you at this day-long event.

It's one of the top questions I get — here's the short answer:

The life cycle of your products and/or services will determine the content you send in a newsletter, and also when and how often you send the newsletter. Typical mailing cycles are daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and quarterly. Hands down the most popular cycle for newsletters is monthly.(Here's a more detailed article about cycles.)

Many companies send regular offer flyers/alerts in between newsletters — with content based on newsletter activity. These flyers/alerts are particularly effective when the content and offers inside are unique to the subscriber, and reflect previous behaviour or interest levels (e.g. purchases, downloads, clicks, etc.).

Within a company’s mailing cycles there can often be periods where emails are sent more frequently than at other times. Examples of more frequent mailing cycles: around key selling times for the products or services, renewal dates, seasonal activities or holidays.

denise cox
Newsweaver