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.

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”.

  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

Mark Brownlow tweeted a link on Friday which is an interesting example from my friends at Think Eyetracking.  While I have to admit I applaud any effort to get eye tracking more in the public eye, I am a little concerned that this was put out there without any additional information.

In the interest of full disclosure, I love eye tracking; it gives email marketers an amazing amount of information on how readers are reading their emails.  Eye tracking uses infrared sensors around a computer screen to track eye movement, literally following the users eyes around the screen and matching that to click behaviour.  Watching the eye movements of one user can be enlightening, but the power comes from looking at the aggregate eye tracks.  By overlaying a number of eye tracks we can create a heatmap (like the picture mentioned above), which shows what is capturing reader’s attention.

The only problem with eye tracking is that too often marketers take the information as gospel rather than as the guide it is meant to be.  Take the pictures that Mark posted for example.  It is true that generally having a photo that focuses on the copy works better than having a photo that faces the reader.  One of the things I have learned about eye tracking however, is that every element in the creative has an effect on every other element.  So whilst the general rule is to have images of people facing the copy, you cannot guarantee that this will be the case in all instances. 

Eye tracking is niether expensive nor time consuming.  It can also be a great time saver by getting a new template design a long way towards optimised before putting it in the field.  The rest of the optimisation is done by good old fashioned testing. 

I recently ran a project for a client where we first used eye tracking to indicate which of three design concepts were the best.  Interestingly, the one that came out on top had not been the client’s or the agency’s favourite.  We then used these initial results to optimise the design and tested it again; further optimising the template from this second round of analysis before putting it in the field with a robust testing strategy to improve it further.  We estimate that even if we had picked the right design in the first place, it would have taken eight to twelve months of testing to get to the version that we put in the field on day one.

Best practice and brand guidelines are a great place to start with your email design but eye tracking can give you a true understanding of how your readers read and interact with your email.  It is important to remember that it is not a silver bullet and what works in one template may not work as well in another.  With new low cost and quick turnaround services however, there is no reason not to give it a try and ultimately incorporate it into your standard email design process.

Skip Fidura
dotAgency

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

'Cyber Monday' is defined as the first workday after the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, and as logic would suggest follows 'Black Friday' which relates in this context to ecommerce and retail sales, specifically the upward trend that follows from these dates in late November through the Christmas period. The terms ‘Black Monday’ and ‘Black Wednesday’ are perhaps better known in the UK but not in the context of retail. 

The report cites examples and highlights strategies used by different retailers, compares 2008 to 2007 and gives great food for thought. If you or your customers operate within the retail sector I would rate it as a recommended read purely for background knowledge, how retailers are using email in the US and perhaps above all the potential for idea generation.

For me the report made for interesting reading and rather than summarise its findings I thought I’d post some thoughts and questions that I had after reading it:

- The term ‘Cyber Monday’ originally coined by US marketers in 2005 (according to BusinessWeek) and has quickly grown. As the report states there is “greater acceptance” of the term including many brands using the term in subject lines and message content. This is interesting. Is it because here in the UK we don’t have a public holiday before Christmas there is less of a clearly defined start point (although broadly speaking the end of November signals an increase in retail spending)? There is no ‘Cyber Saturday’ as such here. If there was a similar term in the UK would brands use it in the same way as US retailers have been doing, mentioning it in subject lines, message body. 

- I wonder how UK and US email volumes, strategies, subject lines, offers compare? Further, to what extent do US parented retailers adapt their home grown methodologies to the UK? What UK based research is available that could be comparable to this report?

- What if any emails that you received from UK retailers drove you to make a purchase late last year? For me it was this retailer. Who, interestingly had a better than most Christmas retail season in terms of sales.

- How would the email strategies of the top UK retailers correlate with their financial results? Who in the UK retail sector is using email in an engaging fashion? How can email be best used to drive sales in retail against a backdrop of slowing retail sales, how are retailers adjusting their email marketing strategies in the economic climate?

The 2008 ‘Cyber Monday’ report written by Chad White can be downloaded by DMA members free of charge here, login required.

Richard Gibson

RSA Direct

The other day Dylan Boyd of eROI who knows that Alchemy Worx have a thing about subject lines forwarded me this email sent by J. Crew and asked me what I thought of the subject line;

Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear (online + in stores)

As I was due a post I thought I would share my response to him with you so here goes.

It is always difficult to answer a question like that without a clear understanding of what they are trying to achieve opens? clicks? sales online? or sales in store? Or, as I can probably guess they are trying to achieve all of the above, which is why I don’t think it is a very good subject line.
 
This is a single proposition email with a very strong and easy to communicate message – Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear – so nothing else is needed in the subject line, unless you strengthen the offer. This could be done by injecting a call to action, adding sense of urgency, additional value or just plain selling the products! I am not a copy writer or fashion guru but here are some examples of what I mean.
 
- Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear – come in and take a peek
- Classic Cashmere to Down Puffers – Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear
- Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear – this week only
- Look great for less this winter – Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear
- Beat the credit crunch – Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear
- Excusive offer: Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear
- Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear – Exclusive offer!
- Online exclusive! Up to 40% off select women’s outerwear
 
What is wrong with subject line is that the second part (online + in stores) actually devalues the first part because it suggests:

- The offer isn’t special to you
- There is no extra benefit to shopping online
- It doesn’t encourage you to look or online window shop
- It doesn’t SELL the fantastic clothing they have in stock

The real problem is the email itself  which doesn’t really provide the recipient with any
more value than a transactional or purchase confirmation email. It demonstrates to me that email is not truly integrated into J Crew’s multichannel strategy.

As I don’t live in the US I don’t know for sure, but I would be very surprised if the offer wasn’t being pushed everywhere on and offline and that J Crew just briefed in the email at the very last minute.
 
Now some more technical points I am sure most people will have spotted this too. It may look nice, but it misses several opportunities – in outlook with the images turned off all you see is 4 red x’s and the alt tag was jcrew.com for every image. Given that the email is entirely made up of images, with very few links – even the nav bar is single image (see below) J Crew really should make use of the alt tags and consider using HTML behind the images.

Now I bet I get a message from J Crew telling me that email broke all previous sales records!

Fingerprint, the analysis tool which enables you to see which email clients your subscribers use to read your emails with, has just released their first report. The report was compiled this month using data from almost 3,000,000 email recipients.

The report looks at both business recipients and consumer recipients – with, I must add, some surprising results.

You can read the full report here

Last week infobox, the DMA Email Council’s newsletter featured the UK launch of a free white paper on subject line length published by my company Alchemy Worx.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read it yet the main findings of the research were pretty startling and run counter to conventional wisdom.

The research suggests that although subject lines with 60 characters or less make more people open your message (the traditional view) these people are less likely to then go on and click on content or offers within the message than people who open an email with a longer subject line. More opens = less clicks! There seems to be an inverse relationship between opens and both click and CTO rates.

As you might expect, we monitor a large number of UK email campaigns, from a cross-section of sectors and companies including British Airways, figleaves, Apple, Amazon JD Sports and Reuters; so I thought it might be interesting find out what subject line lengths email marketers are using and was astonished to find out just how are following conventional wisdom!

Out of 700 subject lines we monitored in the last 90 days, the vast majority—87% of them — were under 60 characters in length. A further 7% fell into the ‘dead zone’ between 60 and 70 character where neither opens nor the CTO rate is optimized, and only 6% of the subject lines were over 70 characters long and therefore likely to optimize click and CTO rates.

Does his mean that everybody out there is only interested in opens and doesn’t care about clicks?  Perhaps we could conclude that email marketers, having extensively and regularly tested longer subject lines, know for a fact that they don’t work?

Somehow I think not.

What’s more likely to be the case is that as an industry we’ve done such a fantastic job of believing the hype that we have stopped testing outside of the accepted norms.

Our whitepaper also found subject lines with a higher word count also optimize clicks and CTO rates. So how do the numbers break down when it came to word count?

The numbers are equally amazing. Only 13% of subject lines monitored contained above 10 words—where clicks and CTO are optimized. 60% fell into the ‘dead zone’ of between 6 and 10 words, where neither clicks nor opens are optimized; and 26% of the subject lines contained fewer than 6 words, and therefore optimized open rates.

What I have learned from this exercise and would like to share with you all is that email marketers need to completely overhaul their subject line test strategy:

● Subject line tests should be more granular—long and short just isn’t good enough. Subject lines need to be broken down into more character groupings (1-10, 11-20, …91-100).

● Introduce word count testing. Words are a much better way of conveying meaning than characters.

● Assess the impact of the number of propositions contained in the subject line on your campaign performance.

● Finally, open rates are just a small part of the story. Your tests should assess the impact of subject lines on clicks, CTO rate and conversions, as well as sales.

My greatest fear is that the people reading the whitepaper will be looking for a simple answer such as “when it comes to email subject lines, short is best”, when in fact the central message is keep searching, keep optimising and keep on challenging assumptions.

Dela Quist
CEO
Alchemy Worx