At the email evolution conference in Miami last year, Yahoo and Hotmail announced that they were looking at allowing dynamic content within an email. ISP’s are concerned about users leaving their site when they follow links in an email. The idea is that when a user clicks on a link they don’t leave the ISP’s site but the content of the link is displayed in the email. This was an encouraging sign that ISP’s would start allowing us to do more with our emails.

In Hotmail these are called Active Views. This basically gives partners the ability to run scripts within an email and produce true dynamic content. Such partners include YouTube, LivingSocial and LinkedIn. But what about the rest of us?

Email service providers talk about dynamic content all the time but this is in regards to personalising the message for individual recipients. When the email is actually sent it is very static.

The more sophisticated marketers can change images that are served to the email to make the email look dynamic. Suppose you are sending a campaign offering a promotion then ends on 1st Feb 2012. The main promotion could be in the form of a number of images. After the promotion has expired you can change the images that are served to say that the promotion has expired. Simple but effective. It is not 100% accurate but there are several companies around that will facilitate this for you if it is something you want to try.

However this still isn’t true dynamic content. What about if the HTML of the email actually changed within email client to give a different message? For example, if the email was promoting restaurant discounts then it might show you different offers depending on the time of day you read the email. Lunchtime offers around midday and Dinner offers later in the day. This could be extended even further to personalise based on your current location. If you read the email in the office then it would show offers for a restaurant round the corner from work. You then go home and look at the same email again and you would see totally different offers for local restaurants near home. The email itself has changed the content based on its location and time of day.

All this is technically straightforward and something you could do on a webpage easily. Many websites already personalise the content based on the country you are in. The difference is that email clients don’t allow background scripts such as JavaScript to run in an email as this opens the way for malicious code to be implanted and run without the user knowing. Active Views is the first step to allowing such scripts to run but in a very secure environment.

So how would dynamic content like this affect your email campaigns? Obviously more targeted content is going to lead to better engagement of the user but would varying content actually work? It may scare and confuse the recipient and lead to reduced click through rates. Only time will tell and I look forward to trying this when it all becomes possible. We will wait and see if anything else regarding dynamic content is announced next month at the email evolution conference in Florida.

A couple of weeks ago, before I flew to the States and entered into a turkey-induced coma, I shared with you some thoughts on five ways email marketing is thriving in a “mocial” world.  Well, as we all well know “thriving” doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges or effort. So, in that vein, here’s a look at five key challenges email marketing faces to stay relevant in a world intertwined with mobile, social and local marketing.

1. Focus on Deepening Relationships. The most savvy email marketers are adopting the long-held belief that email marketing is best suited as a relationship medium. Email programmes today are about adding more depth to customer relationships and expanding connections that already exist with the brand.  Use social media to create buzz and expand brand awareness. Use email to carry that first interest through the customer life cycle.

2. Design and Test for Multiple Devices. Email marketers face a design and testing conundrum with a myriad of new devices on the market. In fact, by the close of 2011, more than forty new tablet devices will have been introduced to the global market.  Email marketers need to make sure their messages are not only readable across of these different platforms and devices, but optimised for that experience.

3. Trigger Messages Based on Behaviour. Focusing on triggered and transactional communications allows email marketing to deliver an experience that can never be replicated in social media.  Real-time, behaviour-based communications triggered by a purchase, product shipment, event registration, etc. allow email marketers to connect with consumers with relevant information times precisely to the consumers interests.

4. Integrate Well with Mobile and Social. In order for email to thrive in this new world, it cannot live in isolation. Integration with social media for opt-ins is a must. And, design and optimisation for mobile devices is also critical.

5. Concise Messages and Focused Design is Key. Each month it becomes less likely that your email message is being read on a PC with a large, bright 19” display. Not only because Apple’s market share is growing along with monitor sizes – but because consumers and prospects are increasingly using mobile devices to triage and manage their inbox on the move.  The content, layout, and design of email messages needs to adapt to be more scannable, actionable, and designed for a touch experience.

The beauty of email marketing is that it never stagnates. Ever. The technology, practices and content strategy behind winning email marketing programmes is continuously evolving, and so long as it does, I believe email marketing has a bright and productive place in the marketing mix.  For now, we have a lot of work ahead of us to adapt our programmes to thrive in this new, Mocial world.  Let’s get started.

If we open an email it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re engaging with the message or the brand. That’s why it takes more than open and click rates to measure subscriber engagement, as Dr David Chaffey points out.

As the year draws to a close, James Bunting does a spot of crystal ball gazing for us email marketers, and it seems the future’s bright.

Email is still the core communication for ASOS. Back in January, I found its email designs lacking, with key messages hidden when images were blocked. ASOS has since totally revamped its designs and is now making the most of all that email has to offer. That’s why it’s this issue’s ‘Campaigns we like’.

But before we say goodbye to 2011, come join David Chaffey and myself at Fusion Marketing Experience where we will be sharing insights and giving master classes on how to improve your marketing efficiency and the all-important ROI.

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

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The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub has been reviewing the current email marketing best practices document over the past few months, and the publication of a revised version is imminent.

One of the things that the review process has identified is a need for more detailed guidance in certain key areas of the email marketing customer life cycle. For this reason, a number of supporting white papers have been produced, which can be found in the “Toolkit” section of the DMA’s website (www.dma.org.uk/toolkit), where they are available for download free to Members.

Here’s a quick summary of what has been produced to date:

Deliverability: Aimed at email program owners who have realised that their broadcasts are experiencing delivery problems, and are trying to identify why this may be the case. Looking at key factors such as sender reputation, spam filtering, blacklist operators, the document provides common-sense guidance on how to deal with them, including 10 easy-to-follow steps to improve your email deliverability.

Creative: Good creative is still an important determinant of a successful email campaign, and is sometimes the only connection a subscriber has with your brand. This document demonstrates that email creative is not a dark art requiring witchcraft and technical know-how! Rather, in non-technical language, it provides some easy-to-implement recommendations that will quickly optimise the performance of your email campaigns.

Data Analysis & Segmentation: Sets out a simple process to help email marketers start segmenting their data, and analysing their results. It defines five key areas to focus on, including: setting objectives; finding the right data; choosing the right segments; different segmentation models, and; effective use of segmentation. It also examines the best methods and approaches to implementing segmentation, as well as how best to interpret the results.

Split Testing: Provides email marketers with the basic capabilities that they will need to run split-testing activity. It looks firstly at the fundamentals that need to be in place to run a split testing program, and then examines ten prime opportunities where split testing can be introduced into any email marketing program to identify the optimal approach to maximise campaign response rates.

Triggered Campaigns: Delivering timely and relevant email messages, using trigger-based email marketing, plays an important part of email best practice. By analysing subscriber behaviour and identifying meaningful changes and/or events, organisations can communicate with their customers at a point when they are most likely to be receptive. This strengthens customer relationships by making them feel valued, and it is not unusual for trigger-based emails to attract high open rates as a result.

In addition to the documents that have been described above, there are also three new white papers whose publication is imminent:

• Using 3^rd Party Data For List Rental & Lead Generation
• A Layman’s Guide to Email Marketing Law
•  Email Lifecycle Marketing

And there are a further two which are scheduled for arrival during Q1 of the New Year:

• Organic List Growth
• Measurement & Reporting

The production of these documents is a collaborative process and the Email Marketing Council, as the representative body of the much larger interest group, is constantly feeding in new ideas about key issues which email marketers would like to have expert guidelines for. Hopefully, the documents described in this article are servicing this need, but it would be great to have direct feedback on whether they are useful, and what the email marketing community would like to see produced next. If you have any feedback for us, then drop a line to email@dma.org.uk , or online via LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter.

Guy Hanson Chairs the The Email Marketing Council’s Legal Data & Best Practice (LD&BP) hub. He is Director, Response Consulting for Return Path.

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%%.

In this month’s Infobox:

Kath Pay of DM Inbox looks at 8 opportunities that are often missed in email marketing and how you can make sure you miss nothing.

Do you have doubts about your existing ESP partner? James Bunting of Communication Corp shows what you should be asking to make sure they are right for you.

Starbucks never fails to impress Tim Watson of SmartFOCUS with their fun, clear and informative emails – he explains why he is more than happy to receive them.

Learn the real value of social media and download a DMA Report. (DMA members only.)

Pick up two new whitepapers by the DMA Email Marketing Council at the Data Analysis, Segmentation & Split Testing Seminar on Wednesday 15 June 2011.

Would you like to receive Infobox in your inbox? Then subscribe here!

Kath Pay, Editor, Infobox
Strategic Consultant, DM Inbox

Sat working in the sun with two five year olds, playing in the shade under the table I was sat on. I was intrigued about the conversation that happened.

Link; “why are these Army men red and Yellow?”

Sunny; “They are funny and would get killed very quickly, everyone knows Army men should be Green.”

The Army men were Yellow and Red because that was the only colour the shop had. The amount of time spent playing with them was slightly more than the green ones, the play was also more imaginative as they moved away from battles in woods to ones on the beach (quite handy if you are Yellow) and Jessica despite hating Army men was persuaded to play for a while (on the condition she was allowed to be the Yellow Army).

On first glance Yellow and Red Army men have very little to do with emails. However it does highlight the fact that you don’t have to always follow convention to get responses. A couple of weeks ago whilst trying to do several things at once I quickly put together an email to send to business people in the land of PR. I wanted to see if the idea had any potential before investing any real time or money into it. The email broke more than one of the best practice guideline (nothing illegal or against the code) but the creative was not that pretty, there was an attachment, the branding or design was poor and the subject line was very long however the response was fantastic with nearly 60% of the people it was sent to responding to it.

The point is that for the majority of the time I believe it is best to follow well tried techniques and learning’s. Follow the DMA guidelines, read and implement ideas from the white papers and guidelines from within your company. However every so often try something a little bit different, brake from convention and see what it does to your response. If it drops through the floor you know to go back to following the more conventional advice. But just as the Yellow and Red Army men got Link and Sunny to engage in a different way with them and gained a new user in Jessica you might strike lucky and gain a positive reaction.

Sara Watts – Data Media and Research

Last Thursday I presented the DMA Upwardly Mobile Webinar about the consumer charge to mobile and the impact on email. The session considered:

• Statistics charting the speed of change
• The amount of email use on different mobile devices
• The email activity on mobile devices by time of day
• Three key areas to factor into email campaigning in a mobile world

I found one of the most interesting charts the usage by time of day. This shows a big peak in email activity at the start of the day.

Consumers wake up and grab their mobile; during breakfast and on the commute they check to see what is new and important in their world. Its no longer about reading the newspaper for world headlines but all about personal headlines. Those things that are important to ‘me’.

Also consumers are not using just a mobile or a desktop email client to read their email but switching continuously during the day between devices. This demands an email that works equally well on any device, it is not a choice of making an email great for desktop viewing and another good for mobile. During the webinar I showed a real Starbucks email which we had modified to illustrate how this is possible. On the left is how the email looks on the desktop and on the right on the mobile.

Some HTML magic means the email automatically adjusts to the smaller display of a mobile device. If you would like to provide the code to your own designer as an example of how to create the magic, it’s available here. If you view this in Firefox or Chrome web browsers and simply make the browser window much narrower you will see the transformation before your eyes.
We ran several polls during the webinar including this one.

The people taking part in the poll represent just one consumer segment, professional marketers! However it is still interesting to see just 9% click through on emails. This is low, I believe, because the typical user experience of clicking through to a destination from an email is poor. This currently deters people from clicking on their emails from their mobile. To really work in the mobile world the destination after the email has to be improved for mobile users too. Make your email great and make your website great too.

The whole recorded webinar is available or you may view the slide deck.

It’s not often that anything to do with car road tax excites me but I quite like the fact that 2 weeks before your road tax expires a letter plops through the door with a nice little reminder about how much you need to pay for 6 or 12 months and a unique number for you to type into the website to renew on line and an option for doing it by the post.

A few days later if you have still not purchased your car tax you get the first of two emails reminding you again with a simple click through which takes you to a site which follows the golden rules of

1. Keeping to the point.

2. Clear instructions of what to do.

3. Only asks for the information they actually need.

4. Doesn’t take very long.

The system then goes through a series of checks regarding insurance and ownership and a few days later a lovely new tax disc is sent out in the post.

Nothing ground breaking; no fancy creative’s just a simple example of email being used in an effective useful manner.

Sara Watts Data Media and Research

With addicted like behaviour millions of people are every day feverishly checking their inbox to get their fix of the latest offers.

There is clearly a huge appetite for daily deals and the question is how to take advantage of this opportunity. Let’s look at what makes the Groupon daily ‘fix‘ work.

Groupon, the world’s fastest-growing company ever, has in under two years grown to sending over 50 million emails per day. Its proving lucurative with Groupon taking a big slice of revenue it drives.

Any venture generating such huge growth attracts plenty of others wanting to get in on the action. In the case of daily deals some big names too. Such as Amazon backed LivingSocial, Google Offers, Facebook Places Deals and other smaller brands such as kgbdeals, discountvouchers.co.uk, SecretSales.

They all have in common a proposition of limited time daily discount deals. Consumers have shown they are very happy to get those deals through daily emails. Should brands now be thinking about cutting out the middle man and launching their own daily deals programmes?

So what makes daily deal programmes work?

• The consumer desire to feel they have got a steal.
• A different deal every day.
• A deep discount.
• Urgency created by very limited time availability.
• Fear of regret at not taking a deal, “if only I’d said yes”.
• Relevance of deal to the customer.
• Payment or reward for recommending deals to friends.

First step is to build the list of addicts. Permission and expectation of receiving a daily email is crucial. Place a quick and easy to use sign-up form in a prominent position on your home page. A simple box for the email address and a reason to subscribe. Be clear on the benefit offered. Set the expectation of receiving a daily email and as always, provide transparency about email addresses sharing and privacy policies. Consumers are much more comfortable and likely to subscribe when they know their email address will not be shared.

Then create your deals creative. Let’s breakdown the elements of the Groupon email design from the example below.

The email’s subject line, “Four One-Hour Pony Riding Lessons for £25″ clearly explains the offer. As readers filter emails by subject line, clarity of the main deal is vital here. A generic subject line like, “Your daily deals upto 65% off”, will not ensure the right people read the email. The email body copy above the fold has consistency with the subject line, re-enforcing and expanding on the deal details, in big bold letters.

The cost is clearly stated as well as the saving in percentage and pound terms. Customers know 65% is impressive so the percent value carries weight but as few people can work out how much 65% of £72 is, the pound discount is also needed to explain what a great deal it is. The urgency is clearly stated with the expiry date of the deal. The message is simple; act now.

The large ‘View now’ call to action button makes it obvious what you do next. The objective is just to get you to the landing page where there is further deal information. The email call to action is not ‘Buy Now!’ as the reader may not yet be at the point of having decided. The place for ‘Buy Now!’ is the landing page.

The Pony image messages what the offer is about. The images off email version needs some improvement as the ‘View now’ call to action is not visible because the button is purely image based.

Groupon CityDeals make deals relevant to you based on your location, they ask for city at time of sign up in one simple drop down box. This is not onerous during sign up and there is a clear reason why the consumer should provide the information.

Whilst location is a good criteria for relevance on many Groupon deals, it is also still quite crude. I’ve had these three deals offered in the last three days:

• Pony riding lessons
• Nine Holes of PGA professional golf tuition
• Medi-lipo weight management treatment

None of these are remotely relevant to me. With growing competition of daily deal providers, the customer experience needs improvement to avoid customer churn.

Deals clicked on or bought are the most obvious behaviour based relevance criteria to use for personalised deals. This is also limited. What if I’ve not yet purchased and can anyone predict that as I love Thai food I could be tempted to a skiing session, though golf is not my thing?

Asking customers for their interests through a preference centre is a must to improve relevance in most email programmes. In addition to preference centre a more pervasive experience could be achieved by using a ‘do not like‘ button. I’ve illustrated the concept by adding this into some unused whitespace on a Groupon email, creating the mockup below.

Just above the button in the mockup is the text ‘Tell us if you don’t want more deals like this in future’.

The idea is simple, next time I get a Medi-lipo offer I hit the ‘do not like’ button to say not more lipo deals please, it’s not relevant to me.

Expect to see more innovation in the daily deals space. Groupon aren’t standing still. They are launching a mobile app which focuses on two buttons, “I’m Hungry” and “I’m Bored”. It wants to answer those questions with time and location relevance at the point when you ask the question.

There are also social opportunities to improve customer experience by adding social aspects to the deal pages.

Now is the time to consider your own daily email programmes. The daily fix email is not yet a done deal.