Register now for this virtual summit and learn all about the latest trends and best practices in email marketing without leaving your desk!

And it won’t cost you a penny/eurocent/dollarcent/… 

The DMA is proud to be a sponsor of this, the very first edition of the International Email Marketing Summit.

Not only will you be inspired by the latest tactics that work but you’ll also take away a list of action items you can implement immediately.

Featured speakers

• Dela Quist, Alchemy Worx
• Dave Chaffey, Smart Insights
• Tamara Gielen, Plan to Engage
• Denise Cox, Newsweaver
• Riaz Kanani, Alchemy Worx
• Kath Pay, Plan to Engage
• Arianna Galante, ContactLab
• Tom Bailey, eCircle
• James Bunting, Communicator

What’s on the agenda?

• Beyond just selling: engaging with your subscribers
• 7 reasons why your subscribers don’t respond
• Tips & tricks for designing emails for a mobile audience
• Inactive Subscribers: Prospects or Problem?
• Creating a successful content strategy for email marketing: 8 Easy Steps
• and lots more…

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.

How’s your email database doing? If it isn’t growing as fast as you would like, or worse, if it’s stagnant, it’s time to cast a wider net and look for subscribers in new places.

Naturally, your homepage is the first place to start your quest. Sure, you probably have an opt-in invitation there already, but you must do more than just slap up a data field and say “Sign Up for Our Email.”

Will visitors see it as soon as they land, is it placed in the valuable real-estate known as ‘above the fold’ and do you entice them into subscribing with the benefits they’ll receive?

Beyond your homepage, you should extend a subscription invitation to everyone you connect with – customers, subscribers, prospects and browsers – and everywhere they find you, whether it’s on your website, in your email messages, in your social networks and even offline.

You’ll have to invest some time and money, but it will be worth it. A growing, vibrant database is the lifeblood of your email program. Isn’t it worth a little loving care now and then? 

Finding More Subscribers in Online Places

Here are some prime online locations you might be missing:

1. Every internal page of your website, from product pages to your “About Us,” corporate information and privacy-policy pages, wherever visitors roam around your site.

2. Landing pages associated with external links, such as email or search campaigns, social network links or URLs posted in advertisements, on direct-mail pieces and other paper communications. Google has revealed that only 1 in 9 arriving on a landing actually ‘convert’ so what are you doing to capture the remaining 8?

3. Every social network where you promote your company or content. Here’s how you can attract subscribers in four of the world’s most popular networks:

Twitter: Link to your opt-in or preference-center page on your profile page, not just your homepage. Promote your latest email offer or fresh  newsletter content in tweets, and include an opt-in invitation, as shown below on my Twitter profile.

Facebook: Add a tab promoting your email content on your company Facebook page. Make it the default destination for any visitors who haven’t “Liked” your page yet as seen below with Anthropologie.

Brag about your email in your wall posts. Link to a special landing page that not just features the copy you’re sharing but also has a more prominent opt-in invitation that acknowledges where your visitors are coming from and invites them to sign up.
Also, customise the copy that appears  when people share  your content on their walls to include a link and opt-in invite.

LinkedIn: Create a company-specific page, where you can provide information, highlight key employees and cross-post email newsletters and blog posts. Add a benefit-based invitation, and link to your opt-in page.

Post your newsletter content in your relevant groups. The  numbers might be small, but you’re speaking to the very  people who are most interested in your content. Go for   it!

YouTube: Create a company page, and cross-post any videos you send out via your email newsletters or promos. Make a benefit-based opt-in invitation part of your company profile on the page.

4. The mobile Web. Checking email is the No. 1 activity on mobile devices. So, appeal to your mobile users in that channel. Use SMS (short code messaging) that lets users type four or five numbers to opt in to your email program.

Or, try using a QR (quick response) code that opens up a mobile-optimized opt-in page when a smartphone user scans it.

If you have a mobile app -this is also a wonderful place to promote your signup, as Angry Birds show us below.

5. Your own email newsletters. Suppose somebody received your newsletter from a friend? She’s a hot email prospect, so add an invitation where she’s likely to see it, up in the top third of the email message body. Code the opt-in link so you can track the source, too.

6. Transpromo messages. Turn transactional messages into transpromo (transactional/promotional) messages and reach out to your customers who buy, download or open accounts with your company but haven’t signed up for your messages. You already have their email addresses, but that’s not necessarily a signal to begin sending newsletters and promotional content.

Add opt-in offers to messages that are triggered by customer behaviour, such as these:

• purchase confirmations
• shipping notifications and related emails
• abandoned-cart reminders and other follow-up emails
• account and download confirmations
• payment reminders and confirmations

Invite Subscribers When They’re Offline, Too

Once you cover your online locations, it’s time to go offline. Email already connects all of your marketing channels; so, you should use all of your channels to prospect for new subscribers:

1. The shipping box: One online-only retailer adds a clever little opt-in invite in each package so that it’s the first thing the buyer sees when he opens the box.

2. Your call center: Taking email addresses over the phone can be tricky, but it’s another way to connect your offline customer to your email program.

3. The cash register: Capture the address when the customer is doing the most important thing: buying something from you. This takes some investment in training and in finding which method works best – telling the cashier, writing it on a postcard or typing into a POS kiosk.

4. All over the store: Print an invite anywhere the customer’s eye might stray or where they linger. You can publish the link to your opt-in page, use a QR/SMS for mobile opt-in, or both:

• On the receipt (both paper and emailed/texted versions)
• On a bag stuffer
• On store signs
• Outside the dressing rooms

5. Paper catalogues and sales letters: It’s the same idea as posting an invite on your landing page. Even if your recipients aren’t ready to buy, they might be intrigued enough to take a small step and opt in to your email.

6. Offline ads: If you link to your website in your ads, why not mention your email there too? Once again, you can post a link or use a scannable or SMS code to avoid mistyping.

7: Be creative: No one knows your business and your customers habits better than yourself. Think about key touch points which lend themselves to growing your list, as the napkin below with US Airways.

So, be sure to give your database growth the necessary time and thought required to make the most fo all your customer touch points – you will be greatly rewarded for your efforts.

I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?

So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!

Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.

With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.

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.

One of the contentions that surround email marketing at the moment is the issue of when you retire an email address. Leading up to Christmas, when the heat is on, ambitious sales targets tempt even cautious marketers to push out the boat and send to everyone. If an email list is causing deliverability issues, it is quite common for a bit of a clean up to be suggested. It’s not a “stab in the dark” strategy, because when used correctly it can lead to a net increase in response and revenue.

However, you cannot ignore, when retired email addresses are mailed, they often produce some revenue. This almost flies in the face of the no response/retirement strategy, but in reality, some fine tuning is in order to squeeze all the value from your list.

To deal with this issue properly, you will certainly need response (sales) data for your customers, and need to know which email addresses the data relates too. In most instances the full picture of your list can only be achieved through wider knowledge of the customer.

All too often, the most responsive customers are the ones who have been opening and clicking your emails recently. But it’s also important to segment those who are no longer interested, from those that have disengaged from your emails due to a higher contact frequency than their needs require.

The first stage of the solution should be test the differing frequency of those people who haven’t opened or clicked for a while. Although a 6 month open/click window might be fine for some businesses, it might not suit those businesses with a longer sales cycle or a wider range of buying frequency. In these instances, sending mailings for twelve months or even longer might be better, but proper testing should help you decide when a customer is signalling defection.

If you have transactional data, you can use the principles of RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value) to build up a model which predicts your most responsive customers. In an ideal world you could marry up the purchase RFM data alongside the online engagement data, to see the point where Recency for online engagement (opens/clicks/visits) signals a lapsed customer.

Using email response data, we create two segments, those that are recently engaged, and those that are not (don’t throw any away yet!). The engaged segment can carry on receiving the main campaign emails at the normal frequency. The less engaged segment now gets a rest (for about three to four times the normal frequency of you campaign emails). So if you generally send weekly, rest this segment for a month.

What we are trying to do is identify a segment within the email database that has stopped responding to emails due to a mailing frequency that is too high for them. By responding to the users behaviour, you are able to make changes to the email frequency of this group.

If people from this lower frequency segment, respond, it is important that they don’t go straight back into the main campaign mailing frequency, but give them more of a rest between mailings.

What we are trying to do is to start down the road of mailing people at a frequency that suits them, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to buy more. Managing frequency is the easiest way to respond to behaviour (or lack of it) but if you have more resource, you could try content too. One of the other top reasons why people stop opening emails, is that the emails are no longer relevant to them. The difficultly with content relevance, is that it relies on a deeper customer knowledge, or web behaviour data.

Unfortunately there will be those email addresses in the list that despite your best efforts will never be responsive again. So, at some point you will have to bite the bullet and let these addressees go. It is important to accept that the damage that is done to the whole email programme (in the shape of poor inbox deliverability and reduction in response) will outweigh any extra revenue gained by mailing these inactive email addresses.

Driving home last night, I saw a dead badger on the roadside, and I started ruminating on similarities between dead badgers and email marketing programs ! Not so much from the perspective of being a bit flat, somewhat run down, or showing the first signs of decay ( although all of those are potentially applicable ). Rather, that badgers are notoriously shy, so to be able to estimate their population size, a simple rule of thumb is to take the number of dead badgers on the roadside, and multiply that number by 10 to arrive at a rough estimate of the number of living badgers in that area. The key point is that an apparently small cause can provide a pointer to a much larger effect, hence my unlikely association between badgers and email marketing.

Consider spam complaints. Provided that they are being monitored ( that’s another point ! ) they will form around 0.1% of a good sender’s broadcast . Such a small number is easy to ignore, but it can point to bigger issues:

• According to Return Path’s recent Sender Reputation report, 0.1% equates broadly with a sender reputation score of 90+, with the program achieving ISP accepted rates in the high 90% as a result. By comparison, a complaint rate of 0.4% maps roughly onto a score somewhere between 50 and 80. The corresponding accepted rates decline markedly – anywhere between 27% to 88% – as a result.
• There is also churn to be considered. Let’s say you have an email list of 1M addresses, sending on a weekly basis. That 0.4% complaint rate equates with losing 1/5 of your subscribers over the course of a year, and every single one of them is leaving because they are unhappy with your program.

Unsubscribe requests are a similar case in point. The most recent edition of the DMA’s Email Benchmarking Report shows average opt-out rates for retention campaigns at 1%. As above, that small percentage actually provides the frame for a bigger picture. There are also some additional points to consider :

• Leading on from my comments about spam complaints – if you aren’t reporting on this metric, and are only using unsubscribes to measure levels of disaffection with your program, then you are under-reporting the true state of affairs by a probable factor of two, and possibly more.
• Disengagement should also be regarded as a form of opt-out. Your recipients may not physically request their removal, but if they stop responding then they have become “emotionally unsubscribed”. A re-activation program is your first step, but all the non-responders should then be opted out.

Another small number that can conceal bigger issues is bounce rates. The same DMA report shows average bounce rates for retention campaigns as 2%. Using the same example as above, you would lose your entire database in slightly under a year at this rate !

But there is another alarming dimension to this metric – bounce rates for new subscribers are nearly always substantially higher than the average bounce rate for your entire list. For example, if new subscribers form 2.5% of the total broadcast, then an average bounce rate of 2% might easily mask a new subscriber bounce rate of 20%. To counter this, email marketers need to be doing the following :

• Report separately on the first-broadcast performance of new email addresses.
• Ensure new registrants have a strong imperative to supply a good address.
• Validate new addresses using a process such as double entry, or confirmed opt-in.

So – at the risk of mixing my metaphors, my advice is to look between the trees ( the small numbers ) and see all the badgers that are frolicking in the woods ( the larger considerations ). Learn to interpret these metrics, and act quickly on what may at face value appear to be small variances. In this way, you can remain confident that the first whiff of putrefaction really is coming from that poor badger alongside the A5, and not from your slowly decaying email program instead !

Morrison’s have just finished running one of the best promotions I have seen.

For those of you who missed it, it basically involved going shopping and for every £30 you spent you received a pack of Disney top trump cards. They also added in bonus products that when you purchased them you got an additional pack of cards.

This was advertised heavily on the TV and also the kids at school were swapping cards and this prompted my 6 year old to ask to go shopping to Morrison’s. So somewhere kids have been chatting and with the power of TV I swapped super markets (and have continued to go there after the promotion ended)

Benefits to Morrison’s

• New customers
• The ability to push the sales of products by just putting a bonus Disney sign on them. The shelves where they were positioned could not be stocked quick enough. Mainly been emptied by a hoard of children who had suddenly decided shopping was fun.

They also sold rather a lot of the collector albums priced at £4.

What’s this got to do with email?

Well not a great deal apart from to highlight a missed opportunity by Morrison’s. At no point did anyone have to register to take part in the promotion, so they had no record of who the new customers were and no way to market to them to keep them coming back.

Once the promotion had finished there was lots of information about how you could get any missing cards by visiting the website. I actually wanted to celebrate the stroke of genius, what a great idea get people to register at the end to claim the missing cards. However when I logged on to see what happened it was simply out sourced to the card company where you can buy the cards for 10p each, and despite having to give my name, address, postcode and email in order to order them at no point was I given the option to opt into receive information from Morrison’s.

When could data have been captured?

Although on a professional level, I sometimes subscribe to things to see what happens, my personal email and details are only given out when I can really see the advantage in doing so. There were so many opportunities to do so here, it was just crying out for someone to do so.

People could have been opted in to a Customer database

• At the point when you collect the cards? This was done by the customer service desk and a registration process would have only taken a couple more minutes and an extra pack of cards would have probably got quite a high take up.
• When purchasing the collectors album a reduced price or free folder would have offered an incentive.
• They could have created a community page on the website for swapping cards, this group of people could then have been used for focus groups and research moving forward.
• At the point where you can claim any cards you are missing.

Summary.

An example of a great marketing campaign, but also an example of where a company miss an opportunity to engage and build an ongoing relationship via email. The lessons this highlights it to ensure that email is a fully integrated piece of any business strategy and when appropriate opportunities should be sued to collect information and options from individuals who you can then engage with moving forward.

There’s no doubt there is a change afoot in the email marketing industry. Despite  all the best practice mantras (“must segment more”, “this year we won’t look like spammers”)  it is becoming plainly clear there is a divide growing between those who have stuck to their New Year resolutions and those who have not. Email is becoming the strongest digital media channel deployed by the modern marketer, but to make the most of it, you need to know more than how to push the “spam now” button.

The email channel has arrived with many businesses now acknowledging the importance of the channel to their business model. But despite the importance of the media, there has not been uniform treatment when allocating budgets..

This has been borne out in the recent DMA email benchmark report, that concluded there are “two classes of email marketer; those sending simple campaigns and those splitting lists into multiple segments” concluding ”A major divide has opened”.

The “haves” and the “have nots”

The latest Marketing Sherpa email benchmark report backed up this class system, but seemed to suggested the reason for lack of budget was due to some marketers not being able to justify (or measure) overall ROI. It also suggested that the segment of marketers who were investing liberally were in a “strategic phase of maturity” where they could measure ROI and segment effectively.  Unfortunately the research also revealed only 36% of the companies surveyed measure response by list segment and just33% measure revenue per email .

So it would seem that those organisations investing heavily in email marketing, are those that are best able to measure its ROI and effectiveness, and are best placed to know is value. So, how do you get your email marketing to the strategic phase? And what moves can be made to pitch for extra budget to drive the revenue the email channel can really generate?

Measure email’s influence across multiple channels

Trying to convince the board to allocate more budget to a media that is cheap, that you don’t need to invest much money in to get a return, is tough.

As email marketers, we’ve probably all sat round tables where we have discussed spikes in call centre activity and website traffic following an email campaign. The problem is proving these increases in activity come from email. If these revenue streams are not attributed to email (at least in some part), the budget for developing the media further will never be available.

So, mirroring the findings of the Marketing Sherpa report, if you want achieve more budget for your email campaigns, you need to make sure you are measuring its true value.

The value of Influence

I know it’s a bit of a contentious subject in some circles, but the value of email communication moves far beyond the last bit of revenue that was attributed to the last email sent (and last click). it’s the measurement of that value that provides the greatest challenge for the modern marketer. Over the last couple of years I have noticed that when you directly relate a person’s revenue value, against their open and click behaviour, they relate very closely. So closely in fact, that in some instances 80% of online and offline sales will come from the customers who are regularly and recently opening and clicking your emails. An interesting thought; this means someone who opens and clicks an email, is worth more than one who doesn’t. Factor that one into the equation when working out the value of your email list, and you soon see the people who open and click emails are worth far more than those that don’t (10+ times the value is not uncommon).

Segmenting for Influence

If the recipient is reading your emails, they can be influenced. If they can be influenced, you can encourage them to buy more. And that’s the important difference; if you are only attributing last click revenue to the email channel, it will be reflected in a restricted budget. If you can attribute email’s influence on overall sales, you are more likely to get the money to achieve the greatest returns from email.

Why is this important now?

Thanks to the global economic slowdown, there will be less money in the customer’s pockets and the fight for conversion will be a tough one. Thanks to channel migration, (offline to online) online sales have been growing for several years, sometimes in the face of reducing overall sales.  This growth cannot continue and soon it will be back to the slog of battle for market share. Email will be a key weapon in the marketer’s armoury and your strategy and tactics will either be pulling customers from your competitors or they will be pushing them the other way.

I’ll leave you with a quote from Karin Von Abrams’s* perspective of the DMA benchmark report;

“Time, effort and insight can partially compensate for lack of financial resources. But companies that don’t find either time or money to devote to their email campaigns may soon face the consequences. It probably won’t be too pleasant at the bottom of a two-tier email marketplace.”

*Karin Von Abrams, Senior Analyst, eMarketer

Due to exceptionally good feedback in 2010, the Email Marketing Council decided to re-run the Email Customer Lifecycle series albeit with different speakers, case studies and content. So whilst the overall concept remains the same the content is completely different. In case you have never been to one of these events before the format is quite simple and always held in a morning with a great amount of content in around two and a half hours, allowing attendees to only be out of the office for a short period of time.

The first one of 2011 got off to an excellent start late last month on the topic of list growth or acquisition. The keynote speaker was Richard Evans of Silverpop set the scene for the morning: how do marketers grow their lists whilst balancing all of the internal stakeholder pressure and at the same time, where to most appropriately focus the efforts for the most reward. Several options were presented, along with case study data from leading brands across the morning and speakers included Susan Young of Screwfix, Richard Austin of Silverpop, Denise Cox of Newsweaver and Guy Hanson of dbg. I was impressed not only by the quality of the speakers and the content but the level of engagement and interaction from the audience who challenged the expert panel.

Feedback from the event was incredibly positive and if last year is anything to go by I expect to see many DMA members presenting, participating in case studies and attending the future events in this series. The next event in the Email Customer Lifecycle series will be on the topic of Conversion with two great case studies by MyVoucherCode and CentreParcs, and will take place on 12th July 2011, and is sponsored by Silverpop. Space is limited, so book now to ensure a place at this free event.

If you are interested in attending, or speaking at a future DMA event please contact Amelia Bingham at the DMA.