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…

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

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

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

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

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

Over the years I have implemented automated programs and experienced the extraordinary results they can deliver – from cost saving and improved engagement to higher customer satisfaction levels. However marketing automation magic cannot be conjured up through software alone, and I would argue that the magic is not in its ostensibly “fast and easy-to-implement” software. I think the magic comes from within the tests and learnings within your existing email programs.

When driven by a solidly built customer-focused relationship marketing strategy, marketing automation can be a profitable lead generation and management device combining insight, processes and technology that helps to scale your lead management program. Sure, it can be super speedy to get up and running (ask any software vendor); it can include seemingly cool social behavioural insights and of course it can show results quickly. However getting there is anything BUT speedy, cool and quick (ask any revenue-focused marketer). One of my favourite no-nonsense blog posts last year is from Marketing Profs.: “Planning, detailed execution, and a thorough analysis are key to success. It’s not magic. You can’t just snap your fingers and “poof”― all your marketing campaigns and drip sequences have been put into place.” I couldn’t agree more.

So how do you create Marketing Automation Magic?

Try looking inside your long-running email marketing program. For some time now digital marketing mavens have been foretelling the demise of email marketing in favour of social sharing routes and yet, email is the very foundation and channel by which marketing automation is powered. Need convincing? Take a look at these statistics: Twitter sees about 140 million tweets per day. Email? 188 billion messages. And according to data from Forrester’s Q1 2011 North American B2B Technology Marketing Tactics and Benchmarks Online Survey, email marketing still ranks fifth in a range of 21 tactics that marketing professionals deploy to attract, engage, and persuade customers along the buying lifecycle. Therefore, understanding the behaviours generated by your past email newsletters and by analysing test and learn program results, marketing automation implementations can deliver real results quicker.

You’ve probably been sending monthly email newsletters regularly and have a wealth of information and learnings dating back years. Don’t treat your marketing automation implementation and your email marketing activities as mutually exclusive. Use the vast knowledge and insight sitting in your existing email marketing tool. For example, knowledge of the right format that drives the best results is just one of the insights that should be drawn into your marketing automation plan. If you have been advancing your email marketing program over the last couple of years, you already have insights to drive best-in-class automation:

• Mobile usage across your customer base
• Social interactions and behaviours
• Website behavioural metrics
• Timing and content insights by customer segment
• Revenue generators by content segment

An excellent case study is Citrix’s Anti-newsletter Strategy that employed learnings from their email marketing program and applied them to their automation program. What they learned from their quarterly email newsletter helped drive success in their automation efforts.

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.

Do you spend time writing and preparing content for your email newsletters, crafting your newsletter, hit send – and then check it off as a finished campaign?  If so, you are missing a big digital opportunity to reach beyond the inbox and use your content to draw attention to your company and attract new subscribers.

It’s referred to as a ‘splash and drip’ approach. After you’ve emailed your newsletter and “splashed” all the content out to your subscribers, you can take a few more steps and expand your digital presence. First, promote the newsletter to your own social networks. Then, give your readers the tools to post your newsletter content to their own social networks. Now, extend the life of your newsletter by “dripping” individual content elements of the newsletter.

This content includes links to your articles, and event alerts, videos, graphs, podcasts and presentations within them. Post these newsletter links in your own social profiles, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, etc.  When the opportunity arises, use relevant newsletter article links in your posts on discussion groups, as well as in comments on blogs. As I say, make sure it’s relevant to the topic – or worthy of starting a discussion with! Also, take advantage of social bookmarking outlets such as Digg or Delicious as places to post your newsletter or links within it. (Check out this article showing how social bookmarking can raise your SEO profile.)

P.S. Don’t forget to conduct an subscribe form audit to ensure people coming across your newsletter content via all this social activity can sign up to your newsletter.

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

Like to receive Infobox in your inbox? Then subscribe here

As an email marketer, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Something as arbitrary as the colour of a CTA button can boost your conversion rates.

In this issue of Infobox, expert commentator Mark Brownlow helps you squeeze more out of an A/B subject line test, by testing other elements within your email.

Guy Hanson from Return Path comes up with eight ways to improve your email unsubscribe process, while Sara Watts of Data Media & Research explains how to stop your email marketing from going bad.

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

Article: Five ways to make more of your A/B email tests
Article: Goodbye – hopefully forever!
Article: When good email marketing goes bad
Upcoming event: Email Customer Lifecycle: Win-back
Survey: The 2011 DMA National Client Email Marketing Survey

Like what you’ve read and want to read more? Why not sign up and have Infobox delivered to your inbox.

Due to the exponential growth of communication our day to day lives have become saturated with marketing messages. This makes it now so more important than ever for brands to create engaging, relevant email marketing strategies. Consumers are much more likely to shop online or send an email rather than use the phone. Therefore you’d expect brands, in particular retail brands to have perfected the art of online communication. It appears not.

At eCircle we recently conducted a study of thee top UK retailers to analyse just how effectively they used email as a method of communication. To carry out the study we signed up to all available newsletters from the Top 100 Hot Shops/Websites as listed by the IMRG and Hitwise.

The results we surprising with many brands failing to get even the email basics right.

Here are some of the results:

• Retailers that had option to sign up to newsletter but never sent any emails out: 19 per cent
• Retailers that failed to deliver regular email communications: 29 per cent
• Retailers that failed to send a welcome message: 60 per cent
• Retailers that didn’t have a newsletter sign up option: 10 per cent
• Retailers that had option to sign up but needed mobile phone number or credit card: 6 per cent

I’m not saying it’s simple but the fundamentals of email marketing shouldn’t be that difficult to get right. I’d suggest these three key steps retailers should take to improve their global email marketing strategies:

The three golden rules

1. Engage: Customers are often most receptive to communication from brands after making an online purchase and engaging customers at this point is integral to any email marketing strategy. Relevant, personalised post-purchase emails that target the customer on an individual level are also critical in encouraging a second purchase whilst simultaneously reminding them of your brand and reinforcing the benefits.

2. Remind: Show lapsed customers why they signed up to receive your newsletter in the first place. What did you use in your original message and can you try to re-employ this tactic to encourage users to respond to your emails now? Overall, make sure your email marketing campaigns are based around users’ identified interests. If this doesn’t work then it might be worth removing these subscribers from your list. A drastic step, yes, but it’s better to have quality over quantity.

3. Reward: Identify frequent buyers and reward them with appropriate offers. You could set up a triggered loyalty scheme campaign where subscribers are rewarded with exclusive discounts, points for every £1 they spend or voucher codes if they spend a certain amount online within a set time.”

Regular email communication is intrinsic in engaging potential customers, rewarding loyalty and encouraging repeat purchases. The basics of email marketing aren’t as tricky as many people think, ESP’s are there to provide the tools and support for you to run your email marketing and as long as you keep the ‘three golden rules’ front of mind you’ll be on the way to email marketing success!

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.