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.

The  question “How do I write effective subject lines?” with all its variants is the No1 FAQ in email marketing, despite the fact that subject lines are probably the most frequently A/B tested variables in email marketing. Most email marketers A/B split test subject lines on a regular basis so why hasn’t anyone come up with the answer yet?

Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.

I think it’s because most email marketing departments do not have enough resource to test more than 2 or 3 subject lines at a time. At that rate it could take several years to gather enough results to come up with a truly effective methodology for subject line writing. Which leaves no other option but to keep A/B split testing.

But relying on relying on A/B split testing to tell you which of the 2, 3 or more subject lines you come up with is like expecting someone to give you a fish every day for the rest of your life. we think it’s time to learn to fish; so we’re launching a unique new research project.

Our aim is to conduct the first ever subject line study to evaluate the impact on ROI of language – grammar, syntax and word choice. In association with digital copywriting agency Sticky Content, we’re analysing the results of hundreds of subject line split-tests conducted by us and participating clients over the last 18 months to find answers to such questions as:

• Which work better in subject lines – questions or instructions?
• What are the most effective words to use in subject lines – and what are the words to avoid?
• Does mentioning your brand name in a subject line really make a difference?
• Does personalisation in the subject lines improve performance?

Send us your subject lines – get a FREE advance report

Have you run A/B subject line tests in the last 18 months? If so, we would like to invite you to pool your test data with ours to create the largest collaborative subject line study ever run (and get a free copy advance copy).

Send us your subject line test results by Friday 2nd July and get a free advance copy of our whitepaper.

Find out more >>

It was birthday a couple of weeks ago and imagine my surprise when I received a birthday email from a high street store that also operates a mail order catalogue. Well when I say birthday email it wasn’t really a card in the form of an email, but rather a marketing email.

Now it started me thinking about how if you’re going to employ that tactic, the approach you should use. Consumers expect that when they give their information about themselves that it is appropriately by that organisation. Marketers need to think about how the consumer will feel about receiving an email that utilises this information.

Whilst a birthday email might seem appropriate there are a few things that don’t work. Firstly, a birthday email is ok, but not when you’re trying to sell me something. It doesn’t give me a particular warm feeling about the brand. It’s more about you than it is about me. Secondly, the offer of free postage and packaging isn’t particularly strong or appealing to make me want to purchase. Finally, why send me an email on my birthday with the text ‘find the perfect outfit for your special day’, when in fact to take up the offer means I won’t get my ‘perfect outfit for my special day’. As far as I’m aware no home delivery service is that quick that I can order in the morning and get it by the evening (well not on a Saturday in a small village in the countryside).

Why not try the email a week to 10 days in advance, so that I have time to think about my birthday and might be inticed to purchase from you. So the message is, use the information I give appropriately, think about when I might want to receive it so that it allows me to think about your offer and potentially take it up. Then send me a birthday email and not a sales email on my actual birthday.

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.

With another Royal Mail strike looming just as the busy shopping season gears up, it’s understandable for retailers to be in a bit of a panic. Having signed off months ago on glossy Christmas catalogues, marketing managers will be left wondering when customers will actually see the results of their hard work (and high printing costs). Will they remain in postal sorting limbo, will they ever be delivered and when? Online retailers will be worried as well: consumers are going to be less inclined to shop online if they can’t have a guaranteed shipping or delivery date for their items.

As if this year wasn’t hard enough on businesses trying to keep a positive balance sheet and stay upbeat amidst the dire financial and economic predictions, now this. So what’s a retailer to do? Where can a retail marketer turn during a quarter so crucial to the company’s bottom line? The answer is email. Now, more than ever. Here are three ideas for surviving, and thriving, the Christmas crunch:

• Build an integrated marketing strategy. Use email to celebrate your printed marketing materials – celebrate what you’ve printed now; there’s no point waiting for them to be delivered to post boxes. Create an online version of your Christmas catalogues and circulars and invite your subscribers to check out what’s on offer this Christmas season. Encourage a sense of exclusivity by offering only your email subscribers a special incentive to start shopping from the online catalogue with a discount or voucher.
• Keep the lines of communication open. Email is a great way to instantly alert your customers and prospects that you’re proactively addressing their concerns about shipping and delivery delays. Email subscribers are primed to engage with your brand. They’ve purchased from you in the past or have requested to receive your email updates. Let them know you’re aware of the effects the strike may have on their brand experience, and if you are taking alternative steps to improve that, let them know. Have you expanded store shopping hours? Are you offering free in-store pickups? Do you have an order tracking functionality that updates their order status in real time? Are you offering in-time-for-Christmas delivery guarantees? Let your email subscribers know about it.
• Drive store traffic. If the crowds on the High Street are any indication, shoppers are already out in droves. Use email to promote your store events, sales and promotions. Offer vouchers that email subscribers can use in store and be sure to include a ready-to-print voucher in the email. All the subscriber needs to do is print off the email, rather than write down or remember a special promotion code or click to a landing page to get a print-ready format. Use the data you collected during the sign-up process to make your store promotions even more relevant. If you have subscribers’ post codes, feature their local store’s postal address and hours of business in the email. Consider hosting a special after-hours makeover session or festive cocktail party for your loyalty credit card customers or frequent buyers, and send these coveted invitations by email.
• Spread the word. Email is a fantastic channel for viral marketing efforts and the Christmas season is a great time of year to send an interactive game or quiz that subscribers can pass along and share with friends and family, thereby expanding your brand footprint with each forwarded message. Have a social media presence? Use your email messages to feature links to your pages and invite subscribers to become fans or followers. Encourage social media activity with exclusive prize draws or games only accessible through your network pages.

Now, more than ever, email is the channel to turn to for ROI, branding and relationship building. There’s never been a better time to press “send”.

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

  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

Sometimes its the simple things well executed that bring the best results.  This is certainly true in email marketing where a strong proposition clearly communicated will bring rewards. As markets continue to bump along in these recessionary times I thought it may be good to look at one of
my favourite examples of a great email marketing campaign we can all learn from.

Howies (www.howies.co.uk) is just one of many clothing companies working hard to make the till ring.  They have plenty of things in their favour including a strong product line and a clean web site with a clear brand personality.  This clarity comes through loud and clear in their email marketing and they have weekly campaigns to complement their seasonal brochure activity and other tactical and transactional promotions.

Here are the 3 simple things I believe they get right every time.

• Operational efficiency – allows them to respond in hours to opportunities
• Beautiful copy – their tone of voice is perfect in a medium where (disabled) images count for less.
• Clear call to action – simple, single-message emails that don't set out to confuse or SHOUT.

So, let's see how Howies put these three elements into action to demonstrate how email marketing can help you in a recession.  Back in November the UK high street went into a price war…20% off was the New Black for many retailers and much blood was shed in the weeks leading to Christmas. Howies are not really ones for leading on price but recognised that they had to respond.  So lets see how each element was skilfully used:

1.  Be nimble as an organisation
Email works when it is relevent and timely.  Howies, like many companies, have managed to organise themselves to get emails dreamed up, written, produced and delivered in a matter of hours.As we'll see in a minute this is the difference between making lots of sales…or not.  At about this time I was talking to the Head of E-Commerce for a big UK retailer who wanted to go to market with a tactical offer, but failed because he needed to raise it in a management meeting, and, if agreed, would need to speak to 3 different IT/web/marketing teams to try and get the campaign airborne.  Too late! No sales.  Use the recession to get your data in one place, get some independence from a management layer and have a library of message templates.

2.  Invest in your copy
As marketers we tend to think we can turn our hand to promotional copy but email is a very un-forgiving medium.  Be too long-winded, choose words poorly or get your tone of voice wrong and your message will fail. Howies on the other hand have a beautiful, consistent "light touch" with words
that makes sure that email, web and brochure all sound like the same conversaion with the same friendly person. And they also understand the "power of narrative"…a popular topic for discussion with web design agencies;  why reel off a list of cheap prices when you can engage people in a story about why you're offering cheap prices…it's more difficult to pull off (you may even need to PAy somebody to do it well), but maybe that's how different you need to be in a recession?

3.  "What's in it for me?"
Having led the reader to the point of making a decision how well do you close the sale?  We all know the standard cues to taking action…an image of the product for us to click on or a phone number to ring,  but Howies make it really simple for us by saying
"20% off all our stuff for the next 24 hours and free postage as well"

Now, weave these three elements together and this is what you get:

More to the point, how successful was this promotion?  Well, I emailed Howies asking for some feedback as I felt it could have been a bit of a cracker and here is their response:

"We literally made the decision to go to sale on the Thursday morning, and by Friday lunchtime, it looked like we were on for the biggest single day in Howies history!"

So, if you want to have the biggest single day in your company's history, be nimble, work on your copy and have a clear offer. Good luck!

Chris Combemale

The Email Academy

£9.11, £20, or at the risk of sounding like Bruce Forsyth – Higher / Lower? 

At the start of January 2009, an article that was published in Revolution magazine put the value of a permission based email at £20. This proposed a new updated value from the £9.11 put forward by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) National Benchmarking report in this post in 2007.

Two things struck me by this:

1. Whilst both these figures can be criticised as being only "finger in the air" – how many companies can, even if they choose not to say, actually place a value of their own asset (excuse me if I don't put email list, database etc but lets call it what it is)

2. Given that they can value this asset do they treat it as such i.e. regularly measure it, manage it, and through a structured process aim to improve it !

Over 2008 I monitored the number of emails I received from 24 companies (I registered but then did not open). Have a look at the monthly figures but the difference was stark.

• One company emailed me 105 times in the year!! This suggests that they are either very persistent, very optimistic or not listening to the feedback they should be getting ?

• Others emailed hardly at all – I opted in and they failed to deliver !

"The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science" - Claude Hopkins wrote in 1923, but my experience over 2008 suggests not all hands !

If companies do not go beyond a "never mind the quality feel the width approach" i.e. How big as opposed to how valuable, they will be unable to have communication that is relevant both to their customers and their corporate goals.

In discussion with various delegates at a recent Ready Steady Email event, feedback suggested that people are starting on the route to email equity but it still has some distance to travel. However the sooner companies start the sooner they should get there!

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Stefan Elliot
Six Serving Men

At the DMA's 'The Practical Guide to Email Marketing' conference' earlier this week, Stephanie Miller from Return Path did a great presentation and briefly addressed the question should personalisation be used? Her findings were: Yes for UK subscribers, No for German subscribers and no for US subscribers as they find it spammy.

Last week Suretymail's, Ann P Mitchell came up with 3 reasons that personalising your subject lines can kill your email deliverability which is a very interesting read and this week Stefan Pollard has also approached this subject – but from a different angle with his article: Personalized Subject Lines: Benefical or Bad?

There are alot of valid points in both sides of the argument – but what it probably comes down to is testing (yes, yes I know – it's a boring answer!). However, what works for you mightn't work for someone else. A lot of the success of the personalisation comes down to your relationship with your subscriber. If you haven't got a real 'relationship' with your subscriber as such then maybe personalising isn't the way to go as they may see it as being artificial or spammy.

So, if in doubt -test.

Kath Pay
Ezemail

PS:  2 other excellent posts on this subject by my good friend DJ Waldow over at Bronto blog are: First Name Personalization -The Debate Continues and Do Personalized Subject Lines Work? (finally an answer)