Category Archives: Best Practice

Avoid these mistaken mobile email head-first tactics

Editor’s note: This guest post is written by Jordie van Rijn, the founder of emailmonday.

If you haven’t looked at all your marketing messages on the small screen, now is the time to do so. Mobile email is hot, and not in the sense of a hype, but in the sense that you need to take it into account. Otherwise you will lose revenue. E-mail is shifting from a pure desktop orientated task to the real, always-on world. Always on has a strong preference towards mobile. The latest report on mobile email shows that the growth isn’t over yet.

The mobile tipping point
On average 41%. of the opened emails originate from a mobile device according to the latest report by Knotice. These are smartphone as well as tablets. The mobile tipping point, the point where half (or more) of email will be read on a handheld device is just around the corner. Earlier this year there was a mobile email tipping point infographic. The researchers expect that the tipping point will be reached this year, even within 6 months.

That is impressive because just a year ago this was only 27%. Although of course you always need to understand your metrics especially concerning mobile email. The shift to mobile has some real implications because the email marketing engagement takes a very different form on mobile devices. Think about the fact that touchscreen are used instead of the much more accurate mouse. The different interaction with mobile webforms and shopping behaviour as well as the reduced screen sizes.

Clicktrough rates on mobile devices

To get a view of the interaction on mobile devices we also need to look the next levels of interaction. Opens are great but more often it is about clicks and conversions. So in the Knotice report the open statistics are complemented with clickdata. Take notice these are the mobile email clickratios, compared to the clickratio on desktops.

Increased mobile email engagement

The clickthroughs on mobile devices are lower compared to desktops, we can all feel that is quite logical and not bad per se. Take emails from financial institutions for instance or emails that link through to a downloadable PDF. Although you could open those on mobile more often these days, it is also the question if you are in the situation to do so. And if recipients feel comfortable doing so. The context also matters, where you are at that moment. It is interesting to see the clickthrough rates from tablets now beginning to become higher than smartphones, these used to be almost identical.

The clickthrough rates on mobile are increasing, this could be explained by three trends:

More companies are sending mobile optimized email
Recipients are more used to interacting with email and websites on their mobiles.
More websites are responsive and are fit to interact with on a tablet or mobile device.

Differences between industries

Mobile e-mail marketing statistics differ strongly per industry, something which is common in all email marketing statistics. Many of the industries appear to level off in their growth, while others are still growing strongly in mobile email. For instance consumer products (22,3% growth, now 36,22%), Cable and Telco (12,6% growth, now 40,35%), consumer services (19,3% growth, now 50,29%). The data from the report is from last quarters of 2012, the first 2013 numbers show a small decline in opens.

Why mobile email should needs an Upgrade instead of an Update
Being unconscious about mobile is definitely no longer an option. Although some say that mobile email optimization (with responsive design) is just a shiny new thing. Tim Watson wrote an excellent piece about how optimizing your mobile email is a waste of time for many. I would say, going from just the title: that is nonsense.

If you are going to optimize for mobile, the trick is to not to treat it like an update, but as an upgrade. This means avoiding the triple play of mistaken mobile-head first tactics.

* Don’t just make your current design “fit for mobile”,
* Don’t just add some “mobile best practices”,
* Don’t just make a new template which the designer filled with things he thinks are cool.

Instead treat it like a chance to swing your emails around and put results first instead of “mobile first” .Go ahead and design a new template if you will, one that takes all the above head-first tactics if you must. But think about your conversions and how you are going to increase your results. As an anecdote, I was involved in a new template design which had already been mobile optimized. But we made a different, new one, Guess what? The new mobile optimized design outpreformed the old mobile optimized design by 75%. 75% revenue that is.

The Draft EU Data Protection Regulations and the Other Compliance Obligations

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As our series of blogs on the proposed EU Data Protection Regulation is almost at an end, I think it’s fair to say that they made for very informative reading. I hope you would agree with me that many marketers can learn something from them. A lot of the main topics within the proposal have been covered. But what are the changes to the compliance obligations which organisations need to consider in their day to day activities if the proposal was to be passed in its current version?

Data processing is featured heavily in the proposed Regulation. One of the changes is around notifying the relevant national data protection authority, in the case of the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), of your organisation’s data processing activities. Currently, providing such notification to the ICO has been a matter of course, whereas the proposal states that full records of data processing activities must be kept by the organisation and only supplied to the relevant national data protection authority on request.

The use of data in many organisations is crucial for marketing purposes, as well as general interaction with customers. If you work client-side, just think of the number of email campaigns your organisation sends out to your customers, whether the customers are active, prospective, lapsed or otherwise. Your data would have had to be processed in some way before emailing, whether it’s cleaning or segmenting for a targeted campaign; therefore keeping a record each time the data is processed with specific information would add another compliance burden to the activity. The obligation to keep records of processing activities is also extended to agencies where dealing with data is an integral part of running of the organisation, such as list rental and lead generation activities. With this in mind, if you think of your own organisation’s activities as well as the number of organisations involved in a typical data processing chain, then the number of data processing activities that will need to be recorded is overwhelming. The ICO is concerned that there is a danger that organisations will focus on the ‘paperwork’ rather than on actual data protection compliance. The removal of the notification fee, which organisations currently pay to the ICO when they complete the notification form, does raise questions as to how the ICO will be adequately funded to carry out its data protection work effectively.

Another change in the proposal which will have a big impact is the requirement for organisations with 250 or more staff to have a designated independent data protection officer. Even though data is crucial to a lot of organisations, the size, reasons for its use and frequency the data is handled and processed amongst organisations varies. The ICO believes that “a simple head-count criterion for the designation of a data protection officer is not the best approach.” Some low head count organisations may process a large amount of information about a lot of people and are therefore high risk. On the other hand, large head count organisations may carry out relatively small –scale and low risk processing. Read the ICO’s report on the draft regulations here

The additional bureaucratic requirements relating to these proposed new compliance obligations will certainly create extra administrative costs, particularly for smaller organisations. As well as the increased documentation of all data processing activities, consider the revision and issue of new terms and conditions, and the amount of employee guidance and training around these changes.

These new compliance obligations , as well as implementing the right to be forgotten, and explicit consent for data processing will mean that all organisations will have to review their day to day activities.

Don’t just aim for an open with your subject line

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Ever heard someone say the purpose of the subject line is to get the open? This is short sighted and the purpose and impact of the subject line goes much deeper. The thinking behind a subject line should be more than “what will make someone read this email?”

A case in point is some work I’ve recently completed for Coinks Deals. I’d like to share with you what was learnt about subject lines and how to best communicate with a large dormant database.

Coinks Points introduced a new deals service for their members and wished to provide these deal emails to members who responded to an introduction email about them. Coinks have millions of members, including hundreds of thousands of who had been suppressed from contact for over 12 months. The challenge was how to message to their entire member database, including the dormant members.

The messaging strategy I developed was a four email sequence using a high degree of personalisation to make connection and re-establish trust with members. Several tests were developed to optimise each step of the sequence, testing a variety of elements, including of course subject lines.

As always with testing, the results were insightful and I’m going to focus on one of the subject line tests and what you can learn from it.

For the third email in the sequence to the dormant segment, one of the tests was of these two subject lines:

Subject A: Are we still welcome in our inbox?
Subject B: Was it something we said?

The email itself was a short mostly plain email with a few links and a couple of central buttons shown below

The subject line B gave a 67% higher open rate. However, what was interesting to show the impact of the subject line beyond the open was the ratio of clicks on the above two buttons.

For subject line ‘A’ the ratio of clicks on the first button to second button was 6.5 whereas for subject line ‘B’ it was 2.8. Customers with subject line ‘A’ were more inclined to click the first button. The test cell sample size was 12,000 and the difference in clicks was statistically significant.

The difference in ratio was due to the different subject lines, it changed how customers read the message and what they did as a result. In this case “Are we still welcome in your inbox?” prompted the customer to consider this very question and whether their answer is yes or no. Whereas “Was it something we said?” does not prompt the direct question and the more conciliatory tone creates more interest in deals.

In the many tests I’ve run over many clients I’ve time and time again seen that what happens in the email is skewed and changed by the subject line. The subject line should be designed to get the right people to open not the most people, the right people means those most likely to take the action you want. Plus the subject line should frame their thoughts correctly.

The subject line is used by customers to self-qualify, if the subject line does not accurately qualify the right people then customers who might have taken action do not open and conversely some open only to find it’s not the right message for them. In this case the risk is customers become less inclined to open again since they found they wasted their time previously.

Summarising two key learning’s:

When testing subject lines don’t stop evaluation at the open rate, get more insight by looking deeper at which individual links were clicked and the call to action of each, to learn why the subject line created a particular result.
Create subject lines with the call to action in mind. The power and impact of the subject line goes further than getting the read, it’s about getting the action and not just the read.

This was just one test out of many over a series of four emails. The compounded gain across the whole email sequence was an impressive 190%.

Next time you think about subject lines don’t focus on just getting the open but setting up the right thought sequence for the call action.

Acknowledgements: My thanks to Coinks Deals and Emailvision for permission to publish the results from this work.

Opt-In & Opt-Out – Definitions of Consent according to the draft EU Data Protection Regulations

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As a consumer, I am always in favour of legislation which seeks to protect individual freedoms, and reduce ambiguity in what organisations can and cannot do with my personal information. As a marketer too, it is important that the availability and use of a consumer’s personal information be governed by clear guidelines, and ends in a mutually beneficial result – at the bare bones of it; providing a customer with timely, relevant communications based on the data they have provided, at the same time as (hopefully) making a profit for the organisation I am working for.

The real worry is that the current draft of the European Union Data Protection Regulation, does the opposite by introducing more complexity and ambiguity than already exists, and potentially creates further issues which would not have surfaced if the status quo were maintained.

The verbatim definition of consent within the Regulation is as follows:

“…’the data subject’s consent’ means any freely given specific, informed and explicit indication of his or her wishes by which the data subject, either by a statement or by a clear affirmative action, signifies agreement to personal data relating to them being processed…”
[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0011:FIN:EN:PDF Article 4 (8)]

Furthermore, the “Conditions for Consent” are laid out as follows:
1. “The controller shall bear the burden of proof for the data subject’s consent to the processing of their personal data for specified purposes.

2. If the data subject’s consent is to be given in the context of a written declaration which also concerns another matter, the requirement to give consent must be presented distinguishable in its appearance from this other matter.

3. The data subject shall have the right to withdraw his or her consent at any time. The withdrawal of consent shall not affect the lawfulness of processing based on consent before its withdrawal.

4. Consent shall not provide a legal basis for the processing, where there is a significant imbalance between the position of the data subject and the controller.”

[http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2012:0011:FIN:EN:PDF Article 7]

In the above, I have highlighted the key elements here – the Regulation is essentially saying that organisations need to obtain a clear and explicit statement/action by which a data subject provides consent. From an email permission-marketing best practice perspective, this is fine – however the Regulation does not address whether or not this would need to be retrospective for existing databases, and whether or not organisations would be able to contact customers with whom they have had previous interactions (as is currently permissible under the existing Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive – and, the majority of the time, expected by consumers).

This is completely disregarding whether or not those consumers actually want to be contacted, and if the “burden of proof” detailed above is an enforceable requirement (in a worse-case scenario) – then the Regulation is effectively saying organisations must delete said data if they cannot prove consent has been given explicitly! Then there’s the possibility of dispute over the meaning of “informed & explicit”… well, you can see where this is heading to – more ambiguity and less clarity.

Furthermore, there is an argument out there that this Regulation does not take into consideration the low risk use of Business-To-Business (B2B) data for marketing purposes – where, more often than not, a organisation would hold and process information on another organisation or group of members of staff, with perhaps multiple key decision makers – not an individual.

In summary, the intention is good but the detail is lacking – I strongly urge the legislators in Brussels to revise and alter the Regulation so that it can sit with the existing Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive They also need to focus on what the effect of the changes in the draft Regulation will be for both consumers and organisations.
To find out more about the consequences of this legislation passing unaltered, and the potential impact on your own business, take a look at http://dma.org.uk/eu-data-protection This site also provides information on how to take immediate action, by lobbying your regional MEPs.

What is “personal Information” according to the draft EU Data Protection Regulation?

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In order to keep up with new technologies and addressing consumer concerns over privacy the 1995 European Data Protection Directive, which was implemented in UK in the 1998 Data Protection Act is in the process of being updated. This can be a good thing because aside from anything else it aims to reduce the red tape, and add more consistency across Europe. However, the draft proposals are missing the mark and not going to meet the objectives unless some additions and changes are made.

The definition of “personal data” is one example of this; it is proposed to be extended so it could cover some IP addresses and cookies;

“a natural person who can be identified, directly or indirectly by means likely to be used by the Data Controller……in particular by reference to an identification number, location data, online identifier…”

The definition makes no distinction between personal data which is not directly identifiable, such as an IP address identifying a device not a person and data which is, e.g. name and address. Furthermore an IP address only identifies a device not a person. This change would make profiling and web analytics much more difficult, if not impossible. This would change the whole way the internet and email marketing works. The easy user experiences and communications users are currently used to from talented marketers would be replaced with either nothing or un-targeted information, a backward step which will not benefit users or business. The updated European data protection legislative framework need to allow the commercial developments to continue, which will allow business to grow and users to have positive relevant information sent to them.

It is imperative that the definition of personal data is revised otherwise the online economy may be severely damaged.

EU Draft Data Protection Regulation – Data Breach Notification

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Anyone who is in the business of processing personal data will be aware of the proposed new EU Data Protection Regulation. It’s a pretty hot topic right now (as I’m sure you’d agree) as it represents the most significant global development in data protection law since the EU Data Protection Directive that was agreed over 17 years ago. This was clearly way before smartphones were in everyone’s pockets and internet access was in every household, so no one would deny the fact that in this age of mass information sharing, this piece of legislation is in need of some revision.

However, a common view amongst marketers and data owners is that the current draft of the Regulation doesn’t strike the right balance between a) protecting an individual’s right to data privacy, and b) allowing businesses to engage with consumers, using the data they have access to, to deliver really relevant content.

As part of the proposed new Regulation, the European Commission is widening the scope of data protection laws to include a requirement that any business that stores personal data will have to disclose the details of any data security breaches.

So what does this mean and how do data security breaches occur? They can happen in a vast majority of ways, which can include:
• Lost or stolen laptops, removable storage devices (USB sticks etc.) or paper records containing personal information
• Hard disk drives being disposed of or returned without the information being correctly erased
• Hacking
• Staff members accessing or disclosing personal information illicitly
• Unsecured recycling of confidential waste
• Sending sensitive information digitally without encrypting it properly first

According to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) the definition of a personal data security breach is “a breach of security leading the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data transmitted, stored or otherwise processed.” Under the draft Regulation, it’s proposed that any organisation that processes personal data will be required to inform the ICO if a personal data security breach occurs.

So what does this mean for us as Email Marketers?

Essentially it gives the consumer much more information and ultimately control. Yes, this is great for our customers, but not so wonderful for us as many organisations (especially those of us in the email industry who handle a large amount of data for our clients) have expressed concern about potential ‘over-disclosure’ opportunities that could arise thanks to the requirement to provide the necessary information within 24 hours of a data security breach, as envisaged in the draft Regulation. It could potentially force organisations to reveal more information than they need to (such as notifying every individual who might have been affected by the breach rather than those who definitely were). This concern is backed up by recent research from LogRhythm who found that 87% of UK businesses have admitted that they wouldn’t be able to identify individuals affected by a breach within this timeframe.

Another concern amongst email marketers is that this requirement to notify a data security breach within 24 hours doesn’t just apply to organisations based within the EU, but it includes those doing business in it, making the draft Regulation the first de facto global data breach law.

Finally, it could lead to ‘notification fatigue’. With the requirement for each and every breach to be notified, regardless of the severity, consumers could be inundated with breach notifications, which could lead to consumers tuning out.

The good news is that it could take another 3-4 years before the changes come into play, however many of our peers are expressing concern over the negative impact the new Regulation could have on email and direct marketing. The DMA (UK), with FEDMA, is lobbying the EU institutions in Brussels ,the Ministry of Justice and the Department of Culture Media and Sport here in London to try and achieve an outcome that is more business-friendly. We would like to see the requirement to notify regulators and individuals of a data security breach restricted to serious breaches and the 24 hour time limit to notify a breach to be extended. Whatever the outcome is, positive or otherwise, you can bet your bottom dollar that the data security breach notification requirement will remain in the Regulation in some form or other. Therefore, it’s absolutely imperative that you put in place or review clear and well-understood data security breach notification procedures.

LinkedIn: No greater email marketing #fail than over-writing your customers preferences

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I just got this email from LinkedIn Subject Line “A change to your DMA: Direct Marketing Association (UK) Limited digests” – the 3rd such email I have had this week about a group I belong to.
In it they tell me that they are going to ignore my mailing preferences and unsubscribe me from the group digests of which I get 1 a week a frequency selected by ME! I have now been forced to go and re-subscribe to the weekly digests of groups that I want to hear from 3 times this week. Do LinkedIn really think that is a good use of my time?

Just in case anyone was wondering, while I am not really a FB kind of person I definitely am an UBER LinkedIn user.

- I am a paid subscriber and highly active – I post, place jobs, recommend stay in touch connect etc.
- I have several thousand connections
- I check my page multiple times a day and use it as my primary vehicle for maintaining my business network. I have my preferences set exactly the way I want them for some groups – no email, others weekly and some daily
- I get 10 or more emails a day from linked in and open about 1 in 3 on my desktop and 80% of them on my mobile
- I click on at least one a day and some days 3 or more
- I save all my emails I currently have 2900 in my Linked in folder of which less than half 1427 are “unread”
- I regularly search for old messages or invites and click on them

So how on earth can a bunch of engineers and/or too clever by half marketers come to the conclusion that they know what I want better than me?
The irony is by stopping the DMA group weekly digest, they are going to reduce the chances of me ever visiting again! I wonder how the DMA and other group managers feel about that.

I can’t understand why having gone to the trouble of asking me to set my preferences LinkedIn should choose to expressly ignore the stated preference from a highly engaged – dare I say knowledgeable – paying subscriber. Surely that is as bad as spamming after all what is so different about these 2 scenarios?

1) I use LI preference centre choose to receive 1 email a week – after 3 months LI decide to unsubscribe me for not visiting the group.
2) I use LI preference centre and choose to receive 1 email a week – after 3 months LI decide to send me daily digests or 3rd party emails from partners they think I should hear from

LinkedIn are insulting their members’ intelligence one would think that someone like me would know how to both unsubscribe or hit the spam button. So if I haven’t done either of those things, it’s probably because…I DON’T WANT TO!