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.

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.

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

As a consultant on the vendor side of the email marketing industry, I spend a considerable amount of time working with clients to create strategies for solving their email challenges. Whether those challenges are related to attribution, creative templates, acquisition, deliverability or any of the other numerous practices and processes the client is looking to optimise, they almost always impact the client where it hurts the most: revenue and return on investment.

More often than not, the solution for solving the client’s pain – barring any serious sender reputation issues – involves creating a strategy for relevancy. In other words: how to send the right message to the right subscriber at the right time. This includes demonstrating value through the email channel and sending messages that subscribers anticipate and appreciate. Sound like a big ask? It certainly can be, and that’s why it’s especially pleasing to see marketers getting it right. Sephora, the international cosmetics and beauty retailer, does just that with their email program.

Here are some of the best practices they have implemented:

• Showing value with a loyalty program. Sephora offers subscribers access to their “Beauty Insider” program. The incentive to sign-up is to collect points through the purchase process and redeem them for perks, including free samples and a free birthday gift. Their best customers are considered “V.I.B.s” or “Very Important Beauty Insiders.” The email program helps to promote and support the rewards of being a Beauty Insider by using special creative to recognize V.I.B. email subscribers and offering access to exclusive online content, free gifts, invitations to special events and the ability to preview new products before they are launched.
• Sending triggered messages. Sephora sends one of the best post-purchase triggered messages I’ve seen. Two weeks after I visited one of their New York City stores I received an email asking me to rate my purchases. It included images of the actual products I bought and a call-to-action to write a review or rank the product with a star rating. The customised landing page also allows subscribers to enter their comments and upload a photo or a video of themselves using the product. A form at the bottom of the page collects additional data points about the subscriber, including eye colour and skin tone.
• Incorporating useful content. While Sephora’s email program is primarily promotional in nature, their messages still include a lot of useful and relevant content for subscribers. Emails often feature products that are grouped into relevant categories, like beauty problem areas (dry skin, bad hair days, etc.), or include content about new beauty trends, makeover advice or how-to videos for perfecting various looks or techniques. Even small snippets of content help to ensure the messages are relevant for subscribers who aren’t in market to make a purchase at that time, but are still looking for beauty advice and information. In addition, every message includes a link to their “Beauty Talk Community” page where subscribers can submit questions, get expert advice and share comments.
• Collecting preferences and use them. Sephora has a detailed preference center that collects information about everything from a subscriber’s skin type, eye colour, and hair colour and type, to beauty concerns and favourite types of perfume. This information is regularly used to target offers and content. To encourage subscribers to submit their preferences, a triggered message is sent asking for information and explaining why taking the time to enter it will benefit the subscriber’s experience with the brand.

As an email subscriber, I genuinely value the messages I receive from Sephora. I’ve even marked them as “important” in my Gmail Priority Inbox, an action many marketers are increasingly looking for their subscribers to take. As a consultant, I’m impressed with their strategic approach to email marketing. While I don’t know the exact amount of revenue that the email channel generates for Sephora, I would assume it’s pretty substantial. Their subscriber-centric and data-focused approach to email marketing clearly illustrates the value of implementing best-in-class practices, and I consider that to be a beautiful thing.

Email marketers talk *a lot* about relevance and engagement. And rightly so. Email marketing, when done well, can deliver a personalised marketing message not achievable in any other medium. (No pressure, right?!?)

But, as we all banter about personalisation, segmentation and targeting, we are too often failing to send the right signal to recipients. Take a moment to think about your last three email campaigns. Was it clear to the recipient that you actually care about them? About their interests? Even a bit.

We aspire to connect with our recipients. We aspire to be more engaging. And, we aspire to drive more revenue by doing so. So, let’s do it already.

Here are four personalisation tips to help you show your recipients that you really do give a damn.

Tip #1: Dear %%FirstName%% is NOT personalisation. It’s the beginning of a form letter.

In 2001, “savvy” email marketers could address each email recipient by name. In the subject line. In the content. Oh Wow, frank m, that is truly awesome! Please. Stop. Doing. This. It is not personalisation any more than that advert you received in the post last week addressed to MR R J SMITH. It’s a cop-out. You can find better ways to deliver tailored content to recipients.

Tip #2: Relevance cannot be achieved solely with an opt-in form

While getting opt-in forms right is critical, the data you gather through them is just the starting point. It should be enough to drive a fairly relevant first email, but it is not meant to be the basis of all campaigns to follow. Not by any means. It’s like meeting someone at a networking event and discovering they have an interest in cricket. And then, for the next three years, only talking to them about cricket each time you see them. It’s a quick way to become incredibly boring and irrelevant. And in the end, it will leave you and your email marketing programme standing alone.

From that very first message, you should be using each recipient interaction or lack of interaction to tailor future communications. And, you should be driving the recipient to take further action on your website to gather more data points that you can then use to continue the dialogue in a meaningful way.

Tip #3: Behaviour is the best predictor of preference and interest

When is the best time to send an email? What content should I send to this segment this week? Don’t try to guess what to send to recipients or when to send it. If you can do this successfully (and repeatedly) please leave a comment below — I need your help with my stock portfolio. The truth is, behaviour is the best predictor of a recipient’s preference, interest and appetite to engage with your brand. Use past open and click behaviour to predict when you should send a communication to a particular recipient. Use click-through data from email and website analytics to understand what product categories or content is of most interest based on the recipient’s prior interactions. By listening to recipient behaviour and responding to it you will create dialogue and you will have a far higher likelihood of delivering relevant and anticipated communications.

Tip #4: Don’t fake it. (Applicable to multiple areas of life)

Much like Tip #1, if you aren’t going to put in the effort to truly personalise the content in your email marketing campaigns, don’t fake it. Seriously. Don’t even bother. Please go into your template and cut the salutation. Do your brand some good and either commit to being relevant or stick to batch-and-blast methods and execute them exceedingly well. I can promise that your boss, your customers and your shareholders will greatly appreciate your spending the time to be more tuned in to your recipients — using their behaviour to guide the dialogue instead of guessing or, worse yet, not %%caring%%.

There have been many announcements over the last few months regarding the various types of inbox filtering being deployed by various webmail clients. At first they look pretty harmless, with the rules that the ISP’s intend to use ranging from the ambiguous, to the algorithmic detail. If you take the metrics that Google claim they are going to use to identify “wanted” email, it seems they are trying to find out how interested the recipient is in the emails they are sent.

Google’s metrics

- Messages read then deleted
- Messages deleted without being read
- Messages replied to
- Frequency of receiving/reading

As marketers, the only metric we can really measure, is the frequency of receiving/reading the emails. (How many people reply to marketing emails anyway?)This  reinforces the need to focus on individual engagement.

Although there have been one or two conspiracy theory mutterings regarding what might be motivating these changes, you can’t get away from the fact that they will be improving the user experience. And this is what the ISP’s want. If you are happy with the clarity of your inbox, and the management of your inbound mail, you’ll most likely stay with your provider, allowing them to gain further behavioural data, and serve you targeted advertising (and make themselves money). Let’s face it, as a web mail user, it might be free to use, but the trade off is the advertising exposure and revenue.

So this rush to improve customer experience is unlikely to stop. The fact is it’s going to become increasingly difficult to send poorly targeted and conceived campaigns. These campaigns will likely see a gradual decline in response rates, initially blamed on recession (although you can open an email for free), but as likely to be caused by inbox filtering. No matter how good an email marketer you are, you can’t stop the effects of economic slowdown. What you can do is start thinking how you can improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns, and getting into (and staying in) the inbox, is a good place to start.

Sending an email campaign in this new future could become one of the most nerve wracking experiences for the modern day marketer.

• What are my customers going to think of it?
• What if most of my customers don’t open it?
• What if these same customers haven’t opened for a while?
• Could this email discourage my interested customers from opening the next few emails?
• Am I going to lose them forever?
• What if my competitors are doing it better?
• Will I need to spend more money on acquisition?

And ultimately,  if you reduce the ability to influence your existing customers, sales will suffer, and with the costs of getting new ones up to 8 times higher, it’s going to hurt the bottom line.

But it’s not all bad news, in fact for some it’s going to be a big benefit as the inbox will become less cluttered. If yours is one of the “wanted” emails a recipient receives, the inbox filtering should help your message receive the attention it deserves. So for those that are prepared to invest in effective segmentation and targeting for their email campaigns, the future is bright, with email likely to become more effective..  So, we are back to recipient engagement once more, seen as a nice to have in the past, but now vital to protect the value of your email programme.

But it will mean the “one size fits all” weekly newsletter needs to be relegated to the past.

The ability to measure engagement has been with us for a while, and those in the email deliverability circle have been deploying this type of segmentation to successfully manage deliverability for some time. It must now be used to decide who wants to hear from you, those that need a rest for a while, and those who are sick to death of your emails. If the Marketer doesn’t do this segmentation, the Webmail companies certainly will, and once someone’s gone, there’s no going back.

Football Manager, Kevin Keegan can (but doesn’t) claim to be a better manager than Bill Shankley based upon Management Win statistics.  (Shankly won 49.95% of his games as manager, while Keegan won 50.47% ).

In a Digital world the volume and range of numbers can be used by Marketers in a variety of ways. If you look at the Andrew Lang quote “He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts…for support rather than illumination” there are some basic rules to follow to help you quoting email SUPPORT numbers rather than to drive tactics to achieve your business strategy  -

1. Gather lots of data & present many metrics but only highlight the metrics that are positive. “Our  open rate was up 3.2% compared with last month …… but don’t ask about our unsubscribes”
2. Show metrics that are easy to manage / manipulate over business importance – “Our deliverability rate is up 12% …… we only emailed recent subscribers”
3. Use extremely precise numbers and reference 3rd parties to add credibility – “Our open rate is 5.43% more than DMA / IAB / Esp (*delete as appropriate) quoted industry average” …….. rather than compare like for like performance.
4. Use comparisons, but out of context “We got a click through to open rate of 30% up 5% ……. but the actual volume of click throughs was lower than previously”.
5. Show your metrics inconsistently ……. It will stop people comparing effectively if you are adding value.

Whatever you do don’t educate your audience on the small number of key drivers for your business e.g. the health of your email database because

• If you do this will mean that you will have to define an email strategy
• If you start showing simple consistent clear metrics against targets then it is easier it is for the audience to grasp and work out how to think about your email data.
• They then may even ask for it more frequently and request the same data in the same format.
• It will ruin any future ability to keep your metrics “feel good!”

However it may help highlight what is important e.g. maintaining & growing the engagement with your subscribers through better segmented communications.

Just in case they do ask try this:

• Break your database into 3 segments – email addresses that have opened an email in the past month, those who last opened an email over a month ago but in the last 3 months & the rest.
• Give the three segments different values  e.g. £10, £3, & 10p
• Calculate how much your database is worth
• In a month’s time do the same again and compare the difference.

This simple Specific, Measurable, Agreed,  Realistic, Time Bound approach may help you on the journey to SMART email metrics – Alternatively  just stumble over to the Lamp-post.

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.

Frameworks have been used to structure thinking, people and process effectively in many different industries. I created the email hierarchy of needs framework to help breakdown email marketing into distinct key elements and have found it helpful when working with clients on their email marketing programmes.

Its inspired in part by Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The concept is simple. Starting at the bottom of the pyramid each layer builds on the previous one. Each layer must be in place to advance to the next layer. For example, until you have email permission nothing else matters, then when you have permission you need to actually reach the inbox and so on through each layer.

I’ll summarise each of the layers, starting from the bottom and working up before going into how to apply it to deliver a coherent and well executed email programme.

Permission and profile management

Getting permission is an obvious first need in email marketing. This gives rise to questions. Where is permission being requested? Is it being requested effectively? How is the list being grown? Even once you’ve got it you need to keep it and manage it. Are the right people being emailed? Are you legal? What other customer profile data are you collecting and how is that managed? How are different sources of data integrated, what is the approach to CRM? Unfortunately you will sometimes lose permission, so have you got a rescue process in place? How are you learning about the reasons why permission is lost?

Deliverability

Reaching the inbox is always on the email marketers mind. How are you monitoring and checking your deliverability? Using a good ESP will ensure criteria such as whitelisting, DNS, authentication protocols and feedback loops are in place. What pre-send and spam checks are used? Beyond this a good reputation is needed. This is increasingly based on what your customers think of your emails. In short, low spam complaints, high opens and clicks build a good reputation. So doing a good job of the rest of the layers in the pyramid will do most of the work needed for deliverability.

Accessibility

Once the inbox has been reached the email has to display correctly. A message that can’t be read won’t get you very far. Does your email display as you intended in email clients, web browsers and on mobile devices? How will it look with images on and images off? Do images have ALT tags?

Functionality

Email is much more than a printed flyer. Are functional elements of the email working? Its sadly too often that emails are sent with links that go to the wrong place or personalisation that is not working. How about ensuring images are of small byte size so they load quickly? Especially with the trend to read emails on smartphones, where data connection speeds are lower. Processes such as recommend a friend, share to social or unsubscribe need to not only be present in the email but work when you click through. Have the processes changed or stopped working, when was the last time they were tested? Often they are added to a template and assumed they can never go wrong.

Presentation

This is more than just how it looks, but is everything about how the email connects and carries your message to the customer. Its much more than just creative design. What is says and how it says it, the copy and tone. The subject line and the consistency of message from subject through the body. Choice of from name and calls to action copy. How the images fit and carry the emotion of the messaging. How is split testing being used to optimisation this layer? Testing can really tune the presentation and improve bottom line results.

Relevance

Is the email appropriate to the customer? What is the customer expecting and wanting from your emails? Do they match those desires? How about the impact of timing and frequency? When and how frequently should the customer be contacted and about what? Sending too little or too much email? What of the balance between frequency and accuracy of targeting. A higher frequency of emails will be more acceptable if they are well targeted. This layer is all about using customer insight to drive content.

Value

Answering the what’s in it for me question. You may have negotiated your way through all the layers and messaged about a fabulous pair of shoes to the ideal shoe fanatic. However, if the shoes are poor value then it was all in vain. Value doesn’t have to mean a low price or one of free, win and save. Value can also be about providing a better service level, a more generous guarantee, providing valuable information, offering exclusivity or simply being entertaining.

Using the email hierarchy of needs

First be clear about your business goals and marketing objectives. Then review each layer of the email hierarchy of needs and consider these questions.

• Who owns and manages this layer?
• How is strategy mapped into this layer?
• What people skills are required?
• What processes are needed?
• What resources, tools and solutions are needed?
• What testing and refinement is used for continuous improvement?
• What metrics and KPIs should be used? How will overall ROI be measured?

Please do leave a comment if you’ve ideas adding to this or if you’d like me to expand on any particular aspect.