As an email marketing consultant working with clients to improve the performance of their email programs, I have spent a lot of time helping brands change the practices that negatively impact their inbox placement and response rates. While this is both challenging and interesting work, it’s also refreshing to shift focus and appreciate some great practices that marketers are using to stand out from the “grey mail” and marketing clutter, target their subscribers using accurate data and provide relevant messaging that drives engagement.

I recently had the opportunity to experience these practices first-hand as an email subscriber when I made the move from London to San Francisco. My first week in my new city was spent running around taking care of the numerous tasks that come with a move, including the essential (buying a couch) and the mundane (learning how to program my new DVR to record my favourite shows). As I simultaneously added and crossed-off items to my to-do list, I found myself appreciating any effort made on the part of the brands I was interacting with to help me stay organized, sane and appreciated as a customer.

Here are three companies that did just that:

• Crate & Barrel – After purchasing furniture online (and visiting my local store to debate the finer points of curtain accessories with a few very patient sales people – single rods, double rods, hooks, clips, rings, anyone?) and receiving my delivery, an email arrived in my inbox a few days later asking me to rate my recent purchases and write a review of my shopping experience. The message included images of each of the items I’d purchased and a customized landing page with related items for my consideration. A few days later I received a phone call from a Crate & Barrel customer service representative asking me if I was satisfied with my recent order. I appreciated the multi-channel outreach, which came across as sincere rather than pushy, and the related product suggestions listed on the landing page enticed me to buy a discounted item that I had forgotten to order previously.
• Verizon Wireless – When I moved to the U.K. from New York City roughly four years ago, I decided to keep my U.S. cell phone and number active for the trips I knew I’d be making back to the U.S. Lots of friends and family members didn’t have international calling plans so it made it easier for them to call me. In addition, I’d had my cell phone number since college and it was one of the few things I stubbornly refused to give up as part of my transatlantic move. When I made the move back to the US in March, I wound up using my U.S. number again constantly. As a result, I racked up some serious overages on a plan that was originally downgraded for less usage. After the increased bill was generated, I received a message from Verizon letting me know that selecting a different plan could save me money. The message listed the overage charges (divided into voice, text and data categories) with a call-to-action to view various plan options and do an account analysis to determine the best one based on my ongoing usage.  The subject line, “See how much you could have saved last month,” certainly got my attention as moving isn’t particularly bank-balance friendly. The process was simple and easy and the new plan was put into place immediately.
• Zipcar – One of the conveniences of living in a big city is not having to rely on a car to get around. However, something inevitably comes up where one is necessary. Zipcar offers the perfect solution. It’s similar to the “Boris Bike” scheme in London, except with cars. Members pay a small annual fee and then an hourly rate to pick up one of hundreds of cars available at their nearest location, which in my case is across the street. Gas and insurance are included and members can choose from multiple models, whether it’s a hybrid, convertible, hatchback or SUV. After retaking my written driver’s test (as required by the state of California), I applied for a Zipcar membership and received a very helpful welcome message. It was personalized with my name, updated me on the status of my application, told me about the next steps in the process, and provided me with information about my local Zipcar office if I wanted to pick up my membership card in person. Once my membership was approved, I received another email letting me know I was officially a member and alerting me to the fact that my card was in the mail. The message also included instructions for activating my card and a link to view frequently asked questions about the process for reserving a car. There were also calls-to-action for a mobile app and information to contact Customer Service and follow Zipcar on Facebook and Twitter.

A large part of my job is helping brands achieve their marketing and business goals through email, while simultaneously providing value for subscribers. It was great to experience first-hand how smart marketers are using the channel to improve their customers’ lives, one relevant message at a time.

In the last quarter LinkedIn earned $33.3 million from Premium membership subscriptions. That’s 20% of LinkedIn revenues and its grown 87% in the last year.

Persuading more of the 90% of free members to upgrade is a major revenue opportunity for LinkedIn.

LinkedIn are using email to convert members, sending a free one month trial offer. I am a LinkedIn member and after many years still on the free package. As an early adopter of LinkedIn this makes me a target for Premium membership upgrade.

Just as I was putting the finishing touches to a new email copy & creative training deck of 87 slides a LinkedIn upgrade offer dropped into my inbox. It demonstrates several of the principles I’d just covered in the slide deck.

LinkedIn have optimised

What happened next was even better. I found a copy of the same offer from last November in one of my email folders (LinkedIn have tried a few times to convert me).

The difference between the email now and from last November is an excellent case study in email optimisation, so let me share the key elements of what changed and why.

Before

After

Another smart move

Not only is LinkedIn (a social network) smart enough to use email to drive revenue but they also send an urgency based reminder email shortly before the offer is due to expire. A second urgency based email to follow-up on an original offer always improves conversion.

In this issue of Infobox, there’s a lot more to integrating social media and email than just dropping in a few “share to social” icons. Dave Chaffey of SmartInsights, comes up with some inspiring examples of channel integration from the likes of uSwitch and Mothercare.

Dave Chaffey is among the speakers at a free, virtual International email marketing summit, which takes place on 16 May and is sponsored by the DMA.

Elsewhere in this issue, Simon Hill from Extravision analyses email deliverability across the globe and I reveal why I look forward to receiving e-newsletters from The Innocent Group in Campaigns we like.

Kath Pay, editor, Infobox
Co-Founder, Plan to Engage

PS – want articles like these delivered to your inbox twice a month? Then sign up to Infobox here!

It’ll surprise no-one to hear that smartphones and mobile devices are changing the way we receive email. Research suggests 63% of women and 71% of men access email services on their mobile device.

But it’s important to remember this isn’t just a platform used on the bus or in shops. There’s just as much chance you’ll find someone surfing through emails on their mobile while at home on the sofa.

It is perhaps the most ubiquitous way of consuming email in the modern day. So it’s important to take it seriously.

Whether that means making sure emails render properly on mobile devices or ensuring a smooth transition when recipients click through to a mobile landing page, mobile integration can’t be just an afterthought – it needs to be discussed and considered at a strategic level.

Use what you already know

One piece of good news in considering mobile email is that you don’t have to invest in new technologies to get ahead of the game- you’ve got them already. Many email service providers will be able to tell you the exact devices your recipients are using to read your emails and help you focus your attention on certain screen sizes or platforms.

Once you have this baseline understanding, the other important signal to look for is whether this audience is growing and how fast. The opportunity once you have this group segmented is to send them different emails optimised for the platform and test open rates and reactions.

A big part of the potential success here will depend on your business – what works for a retailer may not be so effective if you are a massive B2B services house. But there’s only one way to find out and get ahead of the game.

Responsive design is the future of email

Even better than a separate version though is a relatively old trick, stolen from the world of website development, called responsive design. This allows you to intelligently juggle two style sheets within the same email, but it’s not often that I see this used in all the emails I receive.

It means you can have a more balanced layout specific to the screen size your recipients are using, without obscuring any important calls to action or rendering emails disproportionately.

The best of both worlds.

The last mile

What often lets recipients down is the user experience when they click through to the landing page.

Of course, responsive design could also provide a solution here on your mobile landing page conundrum. Many email marketers get everything right when it comes to the message itself, only to be let down when mobile recipients click through and find a landing page that is impossible to view without some radical scrolling.

It has been argued that perhaps for certain customer databases, mobile opens are not that high or that the rendering of emails on mobile email clients isn’t that bad on templates around 600 pixels wide. However, I would go the extra mile and take a serious look at media queries and responsive design if your mobile open rates are high. This is where it will pay off the most.

It is important to remember that every campaign is a process and that equal attention should be paid to all parts of the recipients’ user journey. Make the most of info you already have – especially when it comes to mobile.

Simplicity, clarify and accessibility

With mobile email marketing, simplicity, clarity and accessibility are always the most important considerations. Smartphone screens are small, the connection can be flaky and a recipient’s time is short. If that recipient is to be worth anything to you, you should consider their time as money!

Mobile presents a world of opportunity and it’s vitally important to tap into this but, at the same time, it is crucial to keep on top of changing trends. Innovations in mobile technology are being so rapidly adopted that some recommendations are out of date as soon as they are published.

Over the last year, the marketing world has seen mobile become a key tool for marketers with the channel being further integrated with others, such as email. With this in mind, marketers must ensure that their email campaigns are formatted to be viewed on mobile devices, including smartphones and now tablets.

A recent review by Forrester found that only 4% of email campaigns broadcasted had a deliberate consideration as to how the email would render on a mobile device. Much more needs to be done with mobile in mind so that marketers aren’t missing some fantastic opportunities. After all, many of us are now checking email more frequently by smartphone than ever before. The opportunity to grow your mobile commerce by communicating directly with recipients who are by nature more likely to make a purchase can’t be ignored. The majority of smartphone users are younger and more trend-conscious, making them key targets to take advantage of m-commerce. In December 2011, it has been estimated that £1.64billion was spent via mobile devices alone, which according to Forrester will grow to 7% of all ecommerce by 2016.

The key to creating relevant mobile experiences for your recipients is quite simple. By following best practice advice you can optimise your messages for smartphones:

• Create text only versions of your emails and provide a link to a web page within the email header
• Decrease email file size to less than 100kb so emails will display quickly on mobile devices
• Fit content to mobile screens – this is different to reducing the file size – To do this you can either design messages with the appropriate pixel width requirement or by using cascading style sheets (CSS) where multiple HTML styles are created so content can automatically adjust to different mobile device display sizes
• Shorten subject lines – mobiles truncate long subject lines, so be sure to get your point across quickly in around 30 characters
• Use mobile-friendly calls to action – unlike the above points, which adapt your existing emails to look good on mobile devices, marketers can also tap in to the immediacy of mobile use with specific campaigns for recipients. For example, retailers have seen success with ‘deal of the day’ email offers and mobile specific calls to action such as click to call and download app
• Add finger space around links – the average adult finger is 45 pixels wide so allow 10-15 pixels more for ‘finger-clicking’ space to avoid people tapping on the wrong link.
• Link to mobile-optimised or specific landing pages – traditional webpages are often to cluttered and slow to load for smartphones. You are able to streamline content for needs e.g directions to stores and one click purchases for your registered users

Using these steps will immediately improve the relevance of your email campaigns but to leverage long-term opportunities and benefits of m-commerce and mobile marketing, you should also be analysing your customer lifecycles to determine when to send your broadcasts to influence key touchpoints. This will instigate the desired action and behaviour at these crucial decision points.

Developing a good email marketing strategy can be a daunting task. To help you get some perspective, here are 3 key stages to keep you on track.

Develop a customer centric communications strategy.

I know this can be a bit of an overused statement, but to make the email channel work in the modern environment of priority inboxes’ etc it is vital. Focusing on the needs and motivations of the customer as they would relate to your brand is a great place to start. If you are going to be talking to the customer and expect them to engage, purchase or become loyal as a response, you’ve got to say the right things. This can’t be done at a campaign tactical level, when the heats on to get more sales to hit target; it needs to be part of an overriding communications strategy. This strategy will set out more than just how many promotional emails need to be sent to achieve revenue objectives. To develop this email communication strategy, these are some of the key elements.

• Understand how your customers perceive the brand and its products or services.
• Research the motivations and needs that engagement with your brand satisfies.
• Research the strengths that define your brand equity.
• Define your customer lifecycle and set business rules to identify where each customer sits.

Focus the strategy on increasing LifetTime Value

Once you have got a clear idea of your customer and the stages the customer goes through in their engagement with you (from discovery to defection), you can start to plan. One key objective of any email communications strategy should be to increase revenue by increasing customer lifetime value. Now, don’t think this is purely a retention statement, it equally counts for acquisition too.

Acquisition

If you’re going to be focusing on lifetime value, it will have an impact on which sources you target for acquisition. Customers coming from sources that provide a low lifetime value customer should be avoided, or the price you pay for acquiring the prospect should reflect their future value. In the case of an email address, they are not all worth the same, so the first task would be to identify sources of prospect email addresses that will provide good future customer value. A good place to start is to look at any results you have from past activity, and look at the overall sales achieved over time, from those customers.  The problem with email is that it is a cheap marketing medium that can be abused with little (apparent) cost implication. Good email prospect data, costs far more than poor quality prospect data, but can be far cheaper in the long term, as it produces good long term results.

Retention

Without the understanding of the customer (and you’ll only get this from the research suggested above) you won’t be able to sell to the customer what they want, how they want it. You’ll only be able to sell your product or service how you perceive it. Customer knowledge also allows you to tailor communications for each stage of the customer lifecycle. This will make your communications more relevant, more effective and more likely to meet business objectives. The strategy should be one that makes every marketing communication be seen as a positive experience by the customer, not a negative “interference” experience.   Ensure you do this by following these key rules:

• Define the commercial objectives for each stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Develop a customer communication plan that reflects the customer research and meets business objectives.
• Ensure research and testing is part of the strategy, to promote future development.

Make it part of a multi touch, multi channel strategy

In a connected world, where people are hooked onto the grid in multiple ways, touch points come via multiple channels. Just to take one example of a device, the smartphone can deliver a marketing message via email, web, social and SMS simultaneously. Studies have been suggesting recently that someone is likely to be watching the telly or walking round a store while access their phone, so the potential for cross media confusion abounds. Add this to multimedia spamming potential, and it makes integrated marketing communications essential for each channel’s success. Email has an important role to play in future direct marketing, with its unique strengths, it can only be effective as part of an overall cross channel strategy. Complimenting other channel activity, email often drives an uplift on other channels as well.

Taking a strategic approach to the email channel can bring lots more opportunity to the party, ultimately allowing customer knowledge to drive content, timing and targeting; nudging that little bit closer to true one to one marketing.

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.

The four key eCommerce marketing trigger emails are; welcome, transaction confirmation, basket abandoned and ratings/review request. Of course there are other opportunities for trigger emails such as Birthday, back in stock emails, win-back and more, however those first four emails are the key emails to put in place before any others.

Here I’m looking at the ratings and review request email. Social proof ratings and reviews have become essential in eCommerce, Reevoo benchmark the average sales uplift due to reviews at 18%. The natural human instinct is to value the opinion of others. My six year old daughter demonstrated this to me. I’d pulled up a page of Nintendo games for her to look at. A few seconds later she exclaimed how one had four stars and another 284 comments. I hadn’t explained social proof or reviews to her and I’m sure its not something taught at school. She seemed to naturally ‘get it’.

A very effective way to build the necessary ratings and reviews is to send a post purchase request email. When Argos implemented such a practice they found 10% of their customers provided a review. If you consider how many purchases you have then 10% is quickly going to add up to a lot of reviews.

The following charts show two ratings examples are from Reevoo:

Which review would you find more persuasive? If you are like most people it will be the one on the right.

The most interesting point about these two bar charts is that they are for the same product. The only difference was reviews for the chart on the right were proactively requested by means of a post purchase email. By asking there is a difference in not only quantity of reviews but the number of positive reviews.

This difference is easily explained. If not asked for feedback, only the less satisfied customers are likely to make the effort to find out how to make a rating and provide it.

Here are some tips for a good review request email.

• The reivew request email should be sent a few days after the customer has experienced the product or service. This should be enough time that they have developed their opinion and not so long that the enjoyment of the new purchase has passed.

• The email subject line and body should reference the item purchased.

• The copy should be short and clear with a well positioned call to action button.

• The process to provide review should be quick and easy. A simple star rating could be collected right from within the email using images for each of one to five stars. That’s easy.

• Avoid clutter that could distract from the review request.

• Remind the customer of your normal support and service channels. If they are not happy, you will want to know directly rather than have a poor review.

ClickZ recently posted this model for ROI calculation of reviews and user generated content and in the last dotMailer ‘Hitting the Mark’ report only 48% of companies studied sent any sort of post purchase email. There is clearly opportunity for many to improve their bottom line.

Oh, and yes I did end up buying the Nintendo games for my daugther that she picked out from the ratings.

Google recently announced it is to close the long running Google Friends newsletter. Launching in 1998, whilst Google was still on Stanford’s servers it has been delivered monthly. That is until now. From next month, the newsletter will cease to exist because subscriber numbers had stalled. But a wider look at Google suggests it doesn’t pay much attention to using email as a channel to communicate with its users.

First, lets take a quick look at the Google Friends newsletter.

Google outgrew this newsletter a long time ago. Each month, the newsletter provided a mix of tips and news across Google’s vast array of products. One month it was Google Toolbar, a Daily puzzle, Google Docs, Earth Day and a power tip for Google Map Maker. Another month it was a power tip on Google Voice and news on Google Places, Youtube, Google Translate and a Doodle for Google contest.

Unless you were interested in everything Google, this newsletter was not for you.

There are perhaps a small niche of people that might like the vast array of news updates across the whole of Google. Given the size of Google, and Larry Page’s new more autonomous business unit approach. Collating and combining these centrally may just have become too expensive versus the benefits. Of course these are their most ardent fans, so ignoring them is an interesting approach.

Overall though, Google’s approach to email is scattered and unorganised at best.

Google pushes out a huge amount of information, highly targeted not just by product but also by country. You can find the full list here, it is truly impressive in scale. You can subscribe to receive this information via Twitter, Facebook, RSS and (of course) Google Buzz! Surprisingly there is no mention of email at all. Given the scale of email (3.1 billion email accounts – click for more stats), its ability to remind users of your products/features and persistently store your message so you can come back to it, not promoting email subscriptions seems like a lost opportunity. Sure, it can be misused but so can all channels.

Relying on Twitter or Facebook for Google updates can easily lead to missed updates as unless I spend all day watching for their updates (not likely!) or proactively remember to visit their profiles on these network, Google is merely hoping I catch their updates in my newsfeeds.  Further you cannot search the Facebook newsfeed at all and searching  Twitter only results in tweets going back a few days.

Subscribing via RSS is an option for me as I am a heavy RSS user, but the usage numbers are low generally especially with a mainstream audience. So low in fact, that the last metric I can find on RSS numbers is from 2005. A rather tiny 275m wordwide.

Finally there is Google Buzz! Is anyone still using Google Buzz?

So where is email? It is there, but to find it you have to click through on some of the blog links where you will sometimes bring up the option of subscribing via email. There is obviously no standardised approach to this. The Blogger buzz blog had it in the right sidebar, the Google Analytics blog doesn’t have it anywhere. It is hit and miss based on the template used.

Email is different.
Different channels offer different benefits. Twitter and Facebook are great for offering casual connections to brands. Brands you really want to hear from? Not so good. For those situations, email is the right tool for the job.

If you are spending all that time creating content, getting in front of as many people who want to read it would seem to be a good thing. People can always unsubscribe. Google even provides that service inside Gmail.

Email marketers talk *a lot* about relevance and engagement. And rightly so. Email marketing, when done well, can deliver a personalised marketing message not achievable in any other medium. (No pressure, right?!?)

But, as we all banter about personalisation, segmentation and targeting, we are too often failing to send the right signal to recipients. Take a moment to think about your last three email campaigns. Was it clear to the recipient that you actually care about them? About their interests? Even a bit.

We aspire to connect with our recipients. We aspire to be more engaging. And, we aspire to drive more revenue by doing so. So, let’s do it already.

Here are four personalisation tips to help you show your recipients that you really do give a damn.

Tip #1: Dear %%FirstName%% is NOT personalisation. It’s the beginning of a form letter.

In 2001, “savvy” email marketers could address each email recipient by name. In the subject line. In the content. Oh Wow, frank m, that is truly awesome! Please. Stop. Doing. This. It is not personalisation any more than that advert you received in the post last week addressed to MR R J SMITH. It’s a cop-out. You can find better ways to deliver tailored content to recipients.

Tip #2: Relevance cannot be achieved solely with an opt-in form

While getting opt-in forms right is critical, the data you gather through them is just the starting point. It should be enough to drive a fairly relevant first email, but it is not meant to be the basis of all campaigns to follow. Not by any means. It’s like meeting someone at a networking event and discovering they have an interest in cricket. And then, for the next three years, only talking to them about cricket each time you see them. It’s a quick way to become incredibly boring and irrelevant. And in the end, it will leave you and your email marketing programme standing alone.

From that very first message, you should be using each recipient interaction or lack of interaction to tailor future communications. And, you should be driving the recipient to take further action on your website to gather more data points that you can then use to continue the dialogue in a meaningful way.

Tip #3: Behaviour is the best predictor of preference and interest

When is the best time to send an email? What content should I send to this segment this week? Don’t try to guess what to send to recipients or when to send it. If you can do this successfully (and repeatedly) please leave a comment below — I need your help with my stock portfolio. The truth is, behaviour is the best predictor of a recipient’s preference, interest and appetite to engage with your brand. Use past open and click behaviour to predict when you should send a communication to a particular recipient. Use click-through data from email and website analytics to understand what product categories or content is of most interest based on the recipient’s prior interactions. By listening to recipient behaviour and responding to it you will create dialogue and you will have a far higher likelihood of delivering relevant and anticipated communications.

Tip #4: Don’t fake it. (Applicable to multiple areas of life)

Much like Tip #1, if you aren’t going to put in the effort to truly personalise the content in your email marketing campaigns, don’t fake it. Seriously. Don’t even bother. Please go into your template and cut the salutation. Do your brand some good and either commit to being relevant or stick to batch-and-blast methods and execute them exceedingly well. I can promise that your boss, your customers and your shareholders will greatly appreciate your spending the time to be more tuned in to your recipients — using their behaviour to guide the dialogue instead of guessing or, worse yet, not %%caring%%.