Over the last year, the marketing world has seen mobile become a key tool for marketers with the channel being further integrated with others, such as email. With this in mind, marketers must ensure that their email campaigns are formatted to be viewed on mobile devices, including smartphones and now tablets.

A recent review by Forrester found that only 4% of email campaigns broadcasted had a deliberate consideration as to how the email would render on a mobile device. Much more needs to be done with mobile in mind so that marketers aren’t missing some fantastic opportunities. After all, many of us are now checking email more frequently by smartphone than ever before. The opportunity to grow your mobile commerce by communicating directly with recipients who are by nature more likely to make a purchase can’t be ignored. The majority of smartphone users are younger and more trend-conscious, making them key targets to take advantage of m-commerce. In December 2011, it has been estimated that £1.64billion was spent via mobile devices alone, which according to Forrester will grow to 7% of all ecommerce by 2016.

The key to creating relevant mobile experiences for your recipients is quite simple. By following best practice advice you can optimise your messages for smartphones:

• Create text only versions of your emails and provide a link to a web page within the email header
• Decrease email file size to less than 100kb so emails will display quickly on mobile devices
• Fit content to mobile screens – this is different to reducing the file size – To do this you can either design messages with the appropriate pixel width requirement or by using cascading style sheets (CSS) where multiple HTML styles are created so content can automatically adjust to different mobile device display sizes
• Shorten subject lines – mobiles truncate long subject lines, so be sure to get your point across quickly in around 30 characters
• Use mobile-friendly calls to action – unlike the above points, which adapt your existing emails to look good on mobile devices, marketers can also tap in to the immediacy of mobile use with specific campaigns for recipients. For example, retailers have seen success with ‘deal of the day’ email offers and mobile specific calls to action such as click to call and download app
• Add finger space around links – the average adult finger is 45 pixels wide so allow 10-15 pixels more for ‘finger-clicking’ space to avoid people tapping on the wrong link.
• Link to mobile-optimised or specific landing pages – traditional webpages are often to cluttered and slow to load for smartphones. You are able to streamline content for needs e.g directions to stores and one click purchases for your registered users

Using these steps will immediately improve the relevance of your email campaigns but to leverage long-term opportunities and benefits of m-commerce and mobile marketing, you should also be analysing your customer lifecycles to determine when to send your broadcasts to influence key touchpoints. This will instigate the desired action and behaviour at these crucial decision points.

I saw a great infographic recently on the importance of email (see below). What really hits home here is that the industry buzz centres predominantly on social media, yet email – “the workhorse of the connected world” – is still used far more than both facebook and twitter put together. There are now more than 2.9 billion email accounts in the world and a staggering 188 billion messages sent daily. Compare this with twitter (140 million messages per day) or facebook (a mere 60 million daily updates). As this infographic shows, “Email is the most used, most valuable and highly prized real estate on the Internet. This is why everyone wants it. Enough said. (click here for a larger version)

Now that’s all very interesting on a global perspective, but what about in the UK? Well, looking at the latest findings from the DMA National Email Benchmarking Report (H2 2010), there is still significant growth in the email channel, in fact +35% in the second half of 2010.

Aside from factors like seasonality, which you would expect, it was also good to see that almost 20% of the volume increase was attributed to the effectiveness & ROI of campaigns that ESP’s were delivering to their customers. More consumers, it seems, are also signing up to receive emails, with increased list size being another key factor in volume growth (+7% in database size from Q2 to Q3, and +3% from Q3 to Q4).
There is more good news: both open and click rates were higher than for the same period in 2009, and click-throughs from email to websites delivered impressive increase vs. 2009 of over one third. (16.1m vs 12m).
The key challenge moving forward is going to be how to retain these results. The ‘more is more’ approach will deliver more traffic to websites from email campaigns but this can be supplemented with more advanced tactics for targeting the booming number of recipients. However, with all the talk about the importance of relevance and personalisation, there has been less headway in 2010 than expected in terms of implementation of more sophisticated segmentation, automation and triggered content. The biggest reasons for this? – The usual suspects: perceived effort, time and resources – plus of course data constraints.
With a growing number of emails vying for attention in our inbox, not to mention the increased channel fragmentation, email marketers are going to have to keep working hard to deliver good content & value in their emails, and to continue to improve their segmentation and 1 to 1 marketing.
The H2 2010 Email Benchmarking Report also features the latest data on strategy and segmentation, as well as open rates and deliverability. You can download the study here (DMA members only) and see the news release here.

Needs you…

Regular readers will know that the DMA Client Email Marketing Survey is an initiative undertaken by the Email Marketing Council and, more specifically, the Email Benchmarking hub, to complement the National Email Benchmarking Report.  The report provides email marketers with valuable research into the state of email, the latest challenges effecting the channel and perhaps more importantly insight into the opportunities of tomorrow.  We are now collecting data for the 2011 survey and would really appreciate it if you could spend ten minutes completing the survey.

Take the survey

In return for taking part in this year’s survey you will receive a free copy of the report.

In my opinion, the 2010 report included a number of highlights:-

• Most marketers agreed that social media presented both an opportunity and threat to their email marketing activity
• 90% of marketers were planning to increase their spend on email marketing
• Concern over budget, resource and data integration were high and likely to have prohibit marketers from targeting, segmenting and integrating campaigns
• Competition in the inbox continued to hot up, with businesses sending more messages and social media messages increasingly taking up space in the inbox

I can’t wait to see what the 2011 report is going to tell us, so please take ten minutes to complete the survey and ensure you receive your free copy of the report.

Complete the survey

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

Benjamin Franklin certainly wasn’t talking about email deliverability when he said, “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it,” however this quote could easily apply to the factors impacting ISPs’ email filtering decisions.

A recent Return Path study confirms that a marketer’s sender reputation is the key to achieving high inbox placement rates and avoiding the spam folder. Return Path’s Analytics Team reviewed data on more than 18 million IP addresses, collected from 30 of the world’s top ISPs and other large-volume mail receivers. These ISPs represent mailboxes in North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

In total, there are three major categories of filtering decisions:

1. Reputation: A quantitative measurement of the desirability of email based on the reputation of the sending server’s IP address. This is affected by a variety of weighted factors, however complaints and list hygiene (i.e., unknown users, spam traps) have the greatest impact.
2. Infrastructure: How your mail server is configured, including the use of authentication protocols like reverse DNS, SPF, SenderID and DKIM. Having a good infrastructure lets the ISPs know you are making an effort to follow their protocols, while failing to have these basics in place makes you look unsophisticated at best and possibly malicious at worst.
3. Content: Filtering based on content has gone way beyond the days when words like “free,” “discount” and “save” triggered spam filters. Today, ISPs apply these filters later on in the process and only on messages coming from IPs where the reputation or infrastructure signals are unclear. In addition, they now search out features of the message that correlate with complaints, spam trap hits and other “negative” signals.

Having good sending practices is the key to building and maintaining a reputable sender reputation score. The higher your score, the more likely it is that your email will reach the inbox.

As the chart below shows, IPs with low Sender Scores (below 60) are rejected at the gateway at an extraordinarily high rate. In the mid-range (60-79), the amount of rejected email goes down slightly, but the amount of email filtered goes up. It is only at the very highest levels (80-100) that email is routinely “accepted” into the ISP system. In fact, IPs with a Sender Score of 100 are 38% more likely to get into the inbox than those with a Sender Score of 50.

Establishing a good Sender Score, maintaining it and monitoring any fluctuations to it are integral to the health of your email program. After all, messages that don’t reach the inbox won’t drive activity, engagement or purchases – essential actions for realizing email ROI.

Your reputation and your Sender Score are well within your control. If Ben Franklin’s quote about reputation were applied to email deliverability, the “good deeds” he refers to are all related to your sending practices. The better your practices, the higher your Sender Score and the more email will reach the inbox. Don’t know your Sender Score? Visit Return Path’s free reputation portal: www.senderscore.org.

In this month’s Infobox:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kath Pay, Editor, Infobox
Strategic Consultant, DM Inbox

In this second part of tips for successful preference centre’s I explore what data should be collected and discuss the potential benefits and pitfalls of using modeling to help drive relevant communication.

6. Start simple and Get the Basics, Then Ask Detailed Information

• When brands require more than three or four preferences, separate opt-in from preference election, first get opt-in with minimum of data such as Email address and Key subscriber data necessary to drive basic customisation (e.g. name or location).
• Also use field validation to standardise and check entries for consistency and even accuracy and asking users to re-enter a critical value like email helps the accuracy of those fields.
• Hitting submit opts in the subscriber then follow up with preferences on next page. Although if you can avoid the words submit and go for something more action orientated and clear such as; ‘Yes, sign me up!’ ‘Update my preferences!’ or ‘Yes, send me email!’
• Also remember that for many companies the objective of an email / multichannel program is to engage consumers in a long term relationship. Like any relationship the more comfortable you are the more you are likely to share. This is just as true of a brand / consumer relationship and so make ongoing data collection a fundamental part of the program. Either by making prominent use of the preference centre link in email or by using softer methods such fun quizzes are a great way to collect and keep data fresh . Keeping it simple or put another way making the data actionable is also one of the key reasons to use preference centre data above behavioural data that may have been collected.
• Which bring us nicely to the debate between explicit and implicit information. The preference centre deals with explicit preferences but often you will see data not necessarily represent reality. At one cinema client you often saw preference data of art house movies and thrillers whereas the booking data shows all animated kids films and ‘Rom Coms’ in these scenarios using models can help you more easily see and target based on these realties.
• The downside for models is that they can be more difficult to implement and require a more sophisticated eco system to capture, analyse and operationally execute. When developing a preference centre marketers should ask themselves the question, “What can we most efficiently determine from models and what should we ask the customer directly?” Of course, any given marketer might have an easier time implementing some models than others. For instance, a next logical product model might be easier to develop than a cadence model but some marketers might lack even rudimentary analytics capabilities. I am a big advocate for ensuring that an email program should be evolutionary and whatever you do don’t get caught up with analysis paralysis, small actions are better than no actions and from studying our clients results you will see the benefits of targeting long before you get to any nirvana state of relevance.

7. Use Welcome and Thank-You Communications to Enhance Preference Election

• On confirmation page, give subscribers the opportunity to correct preference elections immediately.
• Use confirmation and welcome emails to drive preference elections for those who do not do so at opt-in.
• The further removed preference election is from opt-in, the less successful it will be.

8. Make your preference centre an acquisition tool

• Adding an invite a friend link and allowing the person social links – letting their networks know they have signed up, may not drive dramatic numbers will create a more integrated feel to your wider multichannel communications strategy.
• Making sure you have a share to social link on the page to encourage people to share that they have signed up.

The preference centre gives you a great step forward in helping understand and engage with your consumer so go and review your pages now and make sure they are delivering as much value to your business as possible.

Long term sustainable email programs need to be relevant to their audience or else consumers will be less inclined to interact or even cut off communications altogether. The need for relevance becomes even greater when the email program is a core part of a true multichannel engagement strategy, but how do you know what will be relevant? The latest trends and advancements have been around tracking behavioural data but there are privacy and technical challenges involved in this approach and as I point out later some inherent challenges using this data. So the often undervalued Preference Centre / Subscription Management Pages (SMPs) need to be a core element of a successful email program.

The preference centre helps address a few other issues facing today’s digital marketer

• Users can keep their information up to date, and given people’s changing needs combined with the number of people that change email address each year, around a 1/3 according research, it is imperative that consumers have an easy way to update personal info. Freshness of email addresses will also help with deliverability and reducing churn.
• The consumers increasing concerns around privacy and the expectation that the consumer has control. For me the preference centre is a key plank in building and maintaining trust between brand and consumer.
• For a number of our larger multinational / multi business line the introduction of a central preference centre can also help centralise corporate control over communications and streamline from the consumer’s perspective.

So in this 2 part blog I have highlighted 8 tips to help create a more successful preference centre

1. Give sign up prominent real estate on your web site

• You can have the best preference centre but obviously if your customers can’t easily find it then it’s not maximising potential acquisitions and data gathering. Giving the email sign-up exposure on the home page greatly enhances acquisition potential however do consider that many consumers will go from search engines to deep within site, so ensure that email sign-ups also permeate through the site.

2. Only Ask What You’re Prepared to Deliver

• It is very tempting to ask preferences and information for things that might come in handy some day but by asking for data then you are setting the expectations of the consumer that this data will be used in some way and so if you don’t use it you will disappoint your customers and so best to ask only for what you need.

3. Don’t Confuse Preferences with Market Research

• It follows that preference election pages should not be used to field market research questions. Keep the information gathering short and remember that Consumers selecting preferences have an end-goal in mind—more relevant email.
• Non-essential questions suppress completion—about 5%, in our research, per incremental question—and increase the risk of getting bad data from consumers, so again only collect what you need and will use.

4. Only Ask Frequency if You Can Deliver.

• This is also a controversial one since many proponents will say don’t cede this control because it can have a negative impact on your program since most people if asked would prefer less email, but consumption and engagement with your program may suggest otherwise and the preference centre is certainly not the place to figure out optimum frequency.

5. Tell Subscribers What to Expect and why they should give up personal information

• There should be a clear benefit statement/ value exchange why the consumer should give up this info or even better show the consumer what they will receive. One great example I worked on with HP allowed the consumer to make dynamic choices around the type of content they would like to receive and the latest edition would dynamically display. This drove not only actually opt ins but also more complete profiling because they consumer could really understand what they would receive.
• Another important factor in the trust relationship with the consumer is transparency and the use that a consumer’s data will be put to. This is particularly relevant to the privacy policy. Of course there should be an easy way to review the entire policy but since these tend to be monstrous and lets be honest pretty dull documents a best practices should be to ensure highlights (especially if you are doing anything that would not pass the Daily Mail test) then make it clear, make it explicit and you would be surprised what consumers will allow you to do if you are open and upfront.
• Make the unsubscribe and update processes clear, obvious, and intuitive again builds trust and the consumer feeling of control.

In the next part I explore what data to collect and how models can be used to drive relevant communications.

If I had a pound for every time I’ve been asked about the death of email marketing, I’d be “on the cover of Forbes Magazine, smiling next to Oprah and the Queen” (to steal lyrics from the Travie McCoy/Bruno Mars song). Basically, I’d be a billionaire.

Instead, I’m constantly coming up with new ways to answer this question and am always on the look-out for research, statistics, trends and other evidence that will finally convince the world at large that email is here to stay. Rather than cite some of the quantitative evidence I’ve compiled (and there’s a lot), here is something a bit more qualitative, but no less meaningful.

If you were ever in doubt that email is even more relevant now that is was 15 years ago and isn’t going anywhere any time soon, perhaps this will change your mind:

• Email is worth preserving: A recent article in the Independent described an acquisition by the British Library of poet Wendy Cope’s archive, including a collection of approximately 40,000 emails, which it paid over $32,000 for, representing the largest electronic acquisition in its history. Despite Cope’s admission that some of the emails are “not interesting at all,” their combined value is in their ability to show Cope’s more informal thoughts and feelings that may have been omitted from other forms of communication, like letters. As the article’s author so rightly points out, “Letters show us in our best frock; emails will show our underbelly—our peeves, our crushes our irritations.” Email is clearly engrained in the way we communicate and manage our personal relationships.
• There’s an app for that. This phrase no longer just applies to mobile. Major webmail providers are allowing developers to create applications specifically for the inbox to create a richer email experience for users. My colleague, Tom Sather, does a great job of highlighting some of the more innovative apps in his regular “Weekly Roundup” blog postings. Some of the cooler apps out there include:

1. Other Inbox: This tool allows you to automatically organize your inboxes (primarily at Yahoo and AOL) based on priority and category. You also get a daily digest of everything you’ve received by category with the most important messages highlighted for you. It’s basically like having a personal assistant file everything into customized folders (created by you) so that your inbox is less cluttered.
2. Sane Box: This tool provides a similar benefit. It uses your existing contacts, email interactions and your social networks to determine what messages are a priority. It also aims to prevent false positives by monitoring your spam folders for messages that you actively signed up for. 
3. AwayFind: This tool lets you automate your inbox by having an alert sent when you receive an important email.  You have the option of receiving a mobile text message or having your inbox call you and read the messages you’ve received. 
4. ToneCheck. This tool actually reviews the tone of your email messages to help you send email that is less offensive or “emotionally charged.” Designed as a plug-in for Outlook, you’ll see a “Tone Alert” indicator at the bottom of your message that will alert you when the message falls outside of your predetermined tolerance level.

• Email is art. The Aubin Gallery in Shoreditch is currently exhibiting a show called “Authorized.” The artist, James Howard, uses email to create posters and screenings of digital collages from imagery in his huge personal archive of JPEGs, animated GIFs and other screen shots culled from spam messages and junk mail.

So, do you still think email is dead or have I put this topic to bed once and for all?

Since 2007 I have been working with the DMA’s Email Marketing Council and specifically the Benchmarking Hub to produce the National Email Benchmarking Report.  The report surveys leading UK ESP’s to provide companies involved in email marketing with a reliable series of benchmarks to aid their planning and campaign management.  A whole host of information is covered within the report and a quick look at any ESP’s reporting will show a whole load more metrics about your campaign’s success than you probably ever thought possible – but what does it all mean?

Open Rates – Perhaps the most popular email metric of all and certainly one that leads to two very common questions; “what is the open rate?” and “How does it compare?” The open rate is usually calculated as the number of people who have opened an email divided by the number of emails delivered. 

Open rates are often not the be all and end all of a campaign’s success as there are a number of factors that affect their accuracy.  In order to understand that we need to understand how the open rate is tracked. 

Open rates are tracked through the use of code in a tiny invisible image within the email which report back to the sending software when that code is displayed.  The key word here is “image”.  In order for the email to be recorded as an open, images need to be enabled when the message is viewed.  If the email is read without images enabled then no open information will be recorded.  Conversely if a recipient is skipping through their inbox, they may display an email in their preview panel without reading it – if images are enabled this will report as an open even though the recipient didn’t open the message. 

However as the above factors are always constants, if you look at the trends behind your open rate it can provide some valuable insight into your campaign.  A declining open rate might indicate that you need to refresh your subject lines, whereas an improving open rate might highlight that your emails are increasing in relevancy to your audience.

Open rates provide an indication of the success of an email campaign – but need to be looked at in conjunction with other metrics.

Click Rates – This is where things start to get more interesting – especially if you are including specific calls to action within your email campaign.  The click rate is usually calculated as the number of people clicking links within your email divided by the number of emails delivered.

Click rates are tracked by code that is assigned to each link in the email.  This code then reports back to the sending system when the link has been clicked.  As a result, click rates report on specific actions completed by the recipient within the email campaign and don’t have the ambiguity of Open Rates.  This means that you can use your Click Rate as a very good indication of how relevant your email was to your audience.

Click data (the raw data behind the click rate) can be used to provide further insight into your recipient’s activity.  Looking at this information will enable you to see exactly which links within your email were relevant to your readers.  When you know which bits of information the readers were most interested in you can then use this to inform future campaigns – targeting recipients who clicked on specific links with further information of interest based on the link they had clicked.

Click Rates show how relevant your content is and how many recipients you have driven to a particular website – but for many businesses that doesn’t show the complete picture.  That is where conversion rates come in…

Conversion Rate – If the role of your email is to drive a specific action on your website (making a purchase, completing a form, downloading software etc), the conversion rate is a vitally important metric to review.  The conversion rate is usually calculated by dividing the number of people who have completed the action by the number of emails delivered.

Conversion rates are tracked by code included on your website that report back to the sending software when an action has been completed by a recipient of an email campaign. Like click rates, this means that only specific action is reported on making the conversion rate an accurate metric.

In my opinion for the majority of campaigns the conversion rate is the most important metric for the marketer to consider.  This is because it shows what percentage of your recipients completed the thing that was most important to you i.e. made a purchase etc.

When you know your open rate and click-through rate, these become levers you can use to influence the conversion rate.  For example, if you are achieving a conversion rate of 1.5% from a click rate of 9.5% you can assume that doubling the click rate will result in double the conversion rate!

If you would like to know how your metrics compare to those achieved by other emails, why not take a look at the latest National Email Benchmarking Report.