What’s the difference between dynamic content and personalisation?

The difference lies in how the email is built. Personalisation inserts data that is held in your database directly into the content of your email. Dynamic content, on the other hand, is where blocks of tailored content hosted by you or your ESP are inserted according to specific rules set by you.

Give me some examples

For a personalised campaign, you might include details such as your subscriber’s name, address, date of birth – any data that you hold, in the format in which it’s stored – so long as it’s relevant or adds value to your message.

Using dynamic content, meanwhile, you might opt to send different content elements to different subscriber groups that meet certain criteria such as:

• interests: a DIY store might send one content element to customers who browsed garden  furniture, and something different to those that browsed soft furnishings
• geography an international campaign might send content in different languages to users in different countries
• gender you might send one image to males, and a different image to females
• customer type for instance, sending high-value offers to big spenders and lower-value deals to lower-spending customers

Personalisation? Don’t people see through that “Dear <First Name>” stuff nowadays?

It’s true that simply personalising a message with a user’s name doesn’t have the impact it once did. Any message that just tops a completely generic message with a user name is likely to disappoint, and consumers are wary of supposedly personalised messages that turn out to be spam.

However, with a little lateral thinking, there are lots of easy ways to use personalisation to improve campaign performance such as:

• add credibility to welcome messages by including the source of the registration you’re confirming or
• include the Account Manager’s name or signature in B2B campaigns.

Better still, many platforms also enable you to set up dynamic personalisation – enabling you to build rules around personalisation. This gives you some of the advantages of dynamic content without the complexity, such as a rule like: “if ‘first name’ blank, use ‘customer’”.

Isn’t creating dynamic content very complicated?

If you haven’t created dynamic campaigns before, your first campaign can seem complicated, but the effort is well worth it: dynamic campaigns can save you significant amounts of time and resource in the long run.

Once you have your rules set up, you can often save them for future use, making ongoing dynamic campaigns only slightly more time consuming to set up and test.

To get you started, follow these steps:

• Create a test list with internal contacts or seed addresses with data that mirrors the data you hold for your subscribers. Then have a play with your platform.
• Start off simply with live data. Use just one dynamic content segment and a couple of rules, then you can build on your campaign’s complexity from there.
• Consider outsourcing the set-up and deployment of dynamic campaigns, so freeing you up to spend more time on generating content and strategies for future campaigns.

Checklist for developing campaigns with tailored content

Personalisation and dynamic content can provide a significant uplift to your campaign performance when done well; get it wrong, however, and you can harm your brand and reputation. Here’s what you need to get right:

• Check the quality of your data – are all fields complete and accurate?
• Make sure you’ve thought through the logic properly, and specify default values where appropriate.
• Test your campaigns thoroughly. With some ESPs you can test before deployment using live data; otherwise, create some dummy data and generate a test mailing to that list before your final deployment.
• Check your hosted version: whether personalisation or dynamic content carry through to your hosted version will depend on your platform.
• Find out what reporting is available for dynamic/personalised campaigns. Even if your platform cannot report on the performance of different content segments, you should still be able to run reports offline, though this will incur additional time and resource.
• Don’t personalise for the sake of it: only include information that is relevant and valuable to subscribers
• Always test the performance of your personalised campaigns against less targeted campaigns: sometimes broad offerings will generate unexpected sales, after all the fact a customer is male does not preclude them from buying a dress for a friend, relation or even for themselves.

As a headline it would surely grab the attention. From Tuesday 6^th April 2010 the Information Commissioner is now able to issue Monetary penalty notices up to £500,000 where companies persistently contravene the Data Protection Act.

Statements such as “I am trying to raise awareness not revenue” from Chris Graham, the Information Commissioner, suggest the probability of such a sanction for poorly maintaining an email programme is unlikely. This is backed up further by the guidance notes issued by the ICO.

However the change in the ICO’s power of sanction does provide a reminder to revisit the DPA principles and overlay them to your own data at a minimum. In fact it is a great opportunity to spring clean your programme, develop better targeting and improve the effectiveness of your activity.

The recent DMA National Client Email Survey reports that

• Only 30% have a newsletter based on purchase habits
• Only 43% have a contact strategy for the maximum amount of contact
• 55% don’t know if they segment , don’t segment or have only 2-3 segment.
• 77% are unable to track the value of an email

Even allowing for the fact that 62% of statistics are made up (source www.6sm.co.uk) this is more thought provoking given that respondents to this survey are likely to be more aware of email best practice.

Feedback from the recent DMA/IAB Ready Steady email workshop is that whilst the “Do – Review – Refine” approach is acknowledged,  operational constraints often stop this from happening. People are too busy doing, to do it!

So how can the ICO’s new powers help you ?

 a)      Why to do ?  The ICO’s new powers provide the opportunity / alarm call to review if and how well you comply with the Data Protection Act – Which manager would not want an update highlighting the risks and proposed mitigating actions?    

 b)      How to do ? The DPA provides eight principles of good information handling e.g. personal information must be

• 3. Adequate, relevant and not excessive
• 4. Accurate and where necessary kept up to date   
• 5. Not kept for longer than is necessary.

It does not provide definitions of what “relevant” or “kept longer than necessary” means but it does provide the questions your company should define and can highlight where you can be more effective.

For example

• Relevant -  Does your sign up form collect information that you are not sure how you are going to use ?
• Excessive -  Can you tell / control how often you email individuals ?
• Up to date -  Can you confirm / prove opt in initially and how do you define it ongoing ?
• How long is it kept for – Do you set a date for a different approach for non openers / purge them after x months, keep mailing them in the hope that they will open one day?         

Whilst the ICO’s new power of sanction headlines are moving data protection up the board agenda it provides a great opportunity to review and improve your email activity.

The DMA are running a series of events around the email customer lifecycle. The latest on ‘conversion’ was so popular that even after finding a bigger venue the next one’s over half booked after just a week! If email marketing is your thing and you want to attend the next one then I’d get in there sooner rather than later.

In the meantime I thought it would be good for those of you who couldn’t attend the last seminar on Conversion to get a summary view, so here it is:

Richard Lees ‘Initial steps: create conversions’

Richard Lees of the Database Group led off with a comprehensive strategic view, it’s absolutely fascinating the levels of planning these guys are able to support. This level of planning needs to be a part of any marketing plan, but can be intimidating for those without tonnes of resource.

If you simplify the messages, Richard was talking about these three key points:

1. Know what you are trying to achieve and make it the focus of everything you do.

2. Look at the customer lifecycle, all too often marketing works independently of sales (or ecommerce). Marketing can augment every stage of the buying cycle but often the input stops when the initial lead is generated.

3. What does a conversion mean to you? All too often “making a sale” is the default response, but are you considering converting existing customers to buy more or how about getting brand ambassadors on our side?

If you can clearly establish these before you start the process of trying to improve your conversions, your chances of success are greatly improved. My favourite stat from Richard? – each page you need someone to go through to covert you will get an 8% drop off – wow cut those pages down!

I was up next, but we’ll leave talking about me for a bit.
Margaret Farmakis ‘Testing 1-2-3: Get true email ROI’

Margaret Farmakis from Return Path gave us some great insights into the effect further down the line of having poor deliverability, talking through what was to be the theme of the morning – testing.
A couple of interesting stats:

“84% of consumers report clicking through to a relevant email offer”

= So give recipients relevant content and you are very likely to get a click through.

“73% of email users report making an online purchase as the result of a relevant email offer.”

= They’ll end up buying as well!

My favourite speaker was up next, Jean-Michel Boujon.

One of the head honchos over at Theladders.co.uk, he provided a client side view into how he goes about improving the conversion rate of his email campaigns.

• First off – understand which emails are most important in your email campaigns – his password reminders actually generated the highest conversions. Apparently this indicates that the prospect is ready to re-engage with the site and therefore is likely to convert.

• Once you’ve picked the ones you want to improve, test, test then test again! Jean suggested using agency resource to facilitate the extra HTML you’ll need, after all you are working on improving conversions – getting a design budget for that shouldn’t be too tough.

Another interesting insight was that when emails are sent from a female name they got a 10% bump in opens, due to the fact that most of their subscribers are males – how can you apply this thinking to your list?

His slides around landing pages and email content were really interesting, I suggest you download them along with all the presentations from the day *here*. (http://www.pure360.com/email-marketing-resources-insights/conversion)

To finish, some guy from Pure360 (me) did a presentation.

I have 4 key “takeaways” when looking at conversions, follow these and I’ll bet you an overpriced coffee you’ll get higher conversions:

• Get conversion metrics into your email service provider, or wherever you make decisions on email marketing – don’t refine based on email metrics – do so based on conversions!

• Make the call to actions clear as day

• Invest in retargeting your subscribers based on what they have done – Jean-Micheal was a keen advocate of the cart abandon campaigns.

• Make sure your email creative matches your landing pages, you can see a good example from Citrix, poor matching of email and landing pages style, copy and creative will lead to a massive drop off.

You can still (for now) sign up for the final parts three and four of the email customer lifecycle series:

Part three: Engagement and Retention (June)
Part Four: Winback (September)

When the lead goes cold – what to do with inactive e-mail segments

The festive season is here again and the ‘inbox’ is bursting with invitations and enticing offers from a wide variety of email marketers.  As the number of shopping days diminish and the pace of life, for the consumer, intensifies the easy option for retailers would be to increase email frequency in the hope of achieving the highest return on investment.  However, the intelligent e-marketer knows that by segmenting ‘inactive’ consumers it is possible to highlight where new opportunities lie.

Before considering tactics for inactive segments it is important to define exactly what is meant by ‘inactive’. We live in a multi-channel world where consumers are able to connect with you by many different mediums, so while e-mail, for example, may not be particularly effective they may happily interact with you on any number of others. It is essential to take a holistic view – activity from customers or prospects on other channels should have a direct bearing on your email tactics.

When does inactivity become ‘inactive’?  How dead is dead?

The first question to consider is: how long does a recipient have to be inactive before you officially classify them as ‘inactive’? One company’s ‘inactive’ can be another’s ‘active’. The key criteria for your decision should be an understanding of where a customer is in the buying cycle. If it typically takes your customers 30 days to make a purchase then your definition of inactive will be substantially different from a company that’s buying cycle is 60 days. It may also be appropriate to consider how many different spells of inactivity are required before you officially categorise someone.

On a more technical level, be sure that everyone in your team knows what inactive means to your organisation. Not opened? Not clicked? Not purchased? Most important, though, be sure to double check that the e-mails are actually being delivered in the first place! With careful planning and understanding, it is always possible to predict and prevent inactives in the first place.

Change e-mail content for the inactive segment

Re-engaging inactive customers presents a very convenient opportunity to try new content tactics such as adding interactive elements or experimenting with a new format. The first thing you should do, however, is test new subject lines – any other changes will be irrelevant if recipients don’t open the mail in the first place.

If something new manages to rekindle the interest of a certain percentage of inactive customers, it may be worth testing it against the rest of your e-mail list. Of course, if these changes have no impact, there’s no down side as you haven’t exposed your most faithful and profitable customers to the changes.

Invite inactive customers to update their profile

If an inactive customer hasn’t evaluated her profile in a while, it could well be the reason your e-mails have gone unnoticed. Send an e-mail that encourages inactive customers to review their profile information. Let them know that updating profiles will help you deliver more relevant e-mail. It’s an easy and inexpensive way to re-engage inactive customers with your brand.

Experiment with e-mail test streams and zero frequency

Another option is to suppress the inactive customer list and re-introduce it when a new e-mail communication stream with a compelling offer goes live. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and inactive customers may well be apt to open or click on e-mail when they realise they haven’t heard from you in a while. One test that we conducted recently showed that eight to nine per cent of inactive customers opened or clicked on an e-mail after they were reintroduced into the communication stream.

Survey customers about current e-mail content

It may sound simple but the most effective ideas often are. An e-mail survey to inactive customers can help determine the root of the problem. Did the e-mails they were receiving not meet the customer’s expectations? Was the content not relevant to their interests? Were they receiving emails too often or too infrequently? The answers you receive may allow you to engage inactive customers with an alternative programme, or at least understand what improvements or changes need to be made to current e-mail programmes.

Any of these re-activation programmes can be implemented as a trigger simply by targeting segments that have been inactive for a year, six months, or three months – the earlier the better. As said earlier though, never forget that we live in a multichannel world. If you find that none of these tactics is working, look to contact the individual on another channel – there’s no point in fretting or wasting time if you can quickly determine whether an address is incorrect and really ‘dead’ or simply inactive and a prime opportunity for re-engagement.

With another Royal Mail strike looming just as the busy shopping season gears up, it’s understandable for retailers to be in a bit of a panic. Having signed off months ago on glossy Christmas catalogues, marketing managers will be left wondering when customers will actually see the results of their hard work (and high printing costs). Will they remain in postal sorting limbo, will they ever be delivered and when? Online retailers will be worried as well: consumers are going to be less inclined to shop online if they can’t have a guaranteed shipping or delivery date for their items.

As if this year wasn’t hard enough on businesses trying to keep a positive balance sheet and stay upbeat amidst the dire financial and economic predictions, now this. So what’s a retailer to do? Where can a retail marketer turn during a quarter so crucial to the company’s bottom line? The answer is email. Now, more than ever. Here are three ideas for surviving, and thriving, the Christmas crunch:

• Build an integrated marketing strategy. Use email to celebrate your printed marketing materials – celebrate what you’ve printed now; there’s no point waiting for them to be delivered to post boxes. Create an online version of your Christmas catalogues and circulars and invite your subscribers to check out what’s on offer this Christmas season. Encourage a sense of exclusivity by offering only your email subscribers a special incentive to start shopping from the online catalogue with a discount or voucher.
• Keep the lines of communication open. Email is a great way to instantly alert your customers and prospects that you’re proactively addressing their concerns about shipping and delivery delays. Email subscribers are primed to engage with your brand. They’ve purchased from you in the past or have requested to receive your email updates. Let them know you’re aware of the effects the strike may have on their brand experience, and if you are taking alternative steps to improve that, let them know. Have you expanded store shopping hours? Are you offering free in-store pickups? Do you have an order tracking functionality that updates their order status in real time? Are you offering in-time-for-Christmas delivery guarantees? Let your email subscribers know about it.
• Drive store traffic. If the crowds on the High Street are any indication, shoppers are already out in droves. Use email to promote your store events, sales and promotions. Offer vouchers that email subscribers can use in store and be sure to include a ready-to-print voucher in the email. All the subscriber needs to do is print off the email, rather than write down or remember a special promotion code or click to a landing page to get a print-ready format. Use the data you collected during the sign-up process to make your store promotions even more relevant. If you have subscribers’ post codes, feature their local store’s postal address and hours of business in the email. Consider hosting a special after-hours makeover session or festive cocktail party for your loyalty credit card customers or frequent buyers, and send these coveted invitations by email.
• Spread the word. Email is a fantastic channel for viral marketing efforts and the Christmas season is a great time of year to send an interactive game or quiz that subscribers can pass along and share with friends and family, thereby expanding your brand footprint with each forwarded message. Have a social media presence? Use your email messages to feature links to your pages and invite subscribers to become fans or followers. Encourage social media activity with exclusive prize draws or games only accessible through your network pages.

Now, more than ever, email is the channel to turn to for ROI, branding and relationship building. There’s never been a better time to press “send”.

In many cases, businesses earn more in the 10 weeks prior to Christmas than the other 42 weeks of the year combined!

Although the busy period may start in late November, customers are already starting to think about what to buy well in advance. Email is a great way to remind them about products and services that are perfect to put under the Christmas tree. But first, in order to sow the seeds for these emails, you need to have a good list!

As an early Christmas gift to all our email marketers, the DMA has partnered with Pure360 to offer a FREE List Growth Email Marketing event to get you started and make your campaigns successful for the holiday season. With an increase in site visits and click through rates throughout December, list growth and capturing good quality data is vital.

Find out how to grow your opt-in list size from the founder of the Email Experience Council Jeanniey Mullen; gain insight into a case study on how Europe’s largest ticket exchange Seatwave built their database; and make sure all your permissions are legal with email legal expert Stephen Groom at our next free event.

Availability is limited and seats are going fast, so make sure you book today!

This month we have a focus on metrics and results. You can see when marketers are actually sending emails; how to overcome three common barriers to adopting metrics and how to make the most out of your own list.

We also have news from the DMA Legal & Best Practice Hub on its definitive guide to email metrics.

UK marketers do not optimise for time of day; send times are based on sender convenience rather than subscriber preference Dela Quist, Alchemy Worx

Email marketing: overcoming three common barriers to adopting metrics Riaz Kanani, Silverpop

Lists: it’s not the size; it’s how you use it! Tink Taylor, dotMailer

Metrics, metrics and even more metrics Jonathan Burston, Chair of The Legal & Best Practice Hub (alias: Do Good Things Hub)

Read the full newsletter

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You might say that I’m bound to say this but…email marketing is a bit of a no-brainer for tough economic times – it is highly measurable, can be highly targeted and exerts less budgetary pressure than most other DM disciplines. The smartest brands have grasped this and are devoting more time to the channel but, while they are recognising its importance, many are still failing to target their mails and segment their databases effectively. Recent Forrester research showed that 19% of email marketers are still sending a single generic version of an email to their entire contact list while 26% will only divide their list by a single dimension. Put simply, by doing so these marketers are systematically reducing their chances of delivering high returns.

Segmentation is a word that can often provoke fear in the minds of those that hear it – seeming as it does to carry connotations of all sorts of impenetrable IT and data processes. The truth is, however, that with just a little time marketers can segment their email distribution lists into target audiences using data they don’t even know they’re capturing. The key is knowing where to look. Broadly speaking, there are six places:

A customer’s e-mail behaviour:
The most easily available information is the number of opens, clicks and link-levels your emails get. These simply indicate which subscribers are most interested in your message enabling you to market to them individually, targeting specific topics of interest.

A customer’s profile:
In addition to asking them directly, you could determine your customer’s profile information (such as location, name, and professional title) from other data. A favourite store can give you an idea of their geographic location while a purchase history of childcare goods can be a pretty good indicator of a parent/family.

A customer’s preferences:
Successful email marketing is all about allowing the audience to dictate the details of the communication. The best way of doing this is simply to ask how often they would like to be contacted and what content is most relevant to them.

A customer’s online behaviour:
Simply identifying those customers that have recently purchased, browsed or abandoned a shopping cart can help you generate additional revenue and build relationships. Emails alerting customers to items they left in their shopping cart or a goodwill ‘Thank you for your purchase’ messages can be highly effective.

A customer’s offline data:
It is vital to account for offline customer behaviour and purchase data. This also enables you to provide personalised information in future campaigns such as special promotions tied to a local store, preferred airport, or destination.

Data from Poll/Surveys:
These are useful tools to gauge what different audience segments want. You can use data from polls or surveys to inform decisions on making a change or assembling an offer. For example, ask customers ‘what new feature would you like to see in a monthly newsletter?’, ‘how would you rate the company’s online programmes?’, or ‘how often would you like to receive promotional emails?’

Some or all of these different sources of data are available to most marketers but, of course, simply gathering the data is not enough. Once you have identified what your customers actually want it is essential that you can make this data ‘actionable’, in other words ensure you are actually able access it quickly for timely execution.

Simone Barratt, MD e-Dialog 

Having spent more time than is healthy thinking about how much or how little data is the "right" amount to collect, here are my tips on how to gauge what is right for you.

1. Why am I collecting data in the first place? Consider what you are going to do with the data and make sure that the consumer is made aware of what they should expect when they submit their details.

2. Collecting a very limited amount of information will probably increase your sign-ups, but think about how useful this information will be. Even if you’re just starting out, think ahead. Profiling and segmentation will be a lot more straightforward if you have collected a postal address. Also, consumers are not as scared as you may think about giving their details as long as they can see what they will get in return and how you will look after their data.

3. Permissions – I’ve sat in protracted meetings discussing permissions and I concede that they are dull, however they are vitally important. Most channels are opt-in, although postal is still opt-out of course. Does it make sense to ask people to opt-in for all channels? Test it…does positive postal opt-in result in higher quality, more responsive data than relying on failure to opt-out? Am I future proofing my base by doing this? Is one simple multi-channel permission, followed by access to a preference page, less confusing than a jumble of little tick boxes that may confuse the consumer?

4. Consider a "creeping data strategy". Collect a limited amount of information up front, then use this to communicate and build brand trust with the consumer. Over time, collect additional (but only relevant) in subsequent communications.

5. Where do I put the information I’m collecting? It might sound daft, but is there actually a field in your database where you can store the answers to the questions you are asking? It's all well and good collecting "interesting stats", but infinitely more useful if you can add depth to your database and use the new criteria for targeting.

As you can see there isn’t a right or wrong answer, but be forward thinking, transparent and honest and you’re already half way there.

Rupert Harrison

Chair Best Practice & Data Hub, DMA Email Marketing Council and Data Planner, News International

£9.11, £20, or at the risk of sounding like Bruce Forsyth – Higher / Lower? 

At the start of January 2009, an article that was published in Revolution magazine put the value of a permission based email at £20. This proposed a new updated value from the £9.11 put forward by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) National Benchmarking report in this post in 2007.

Two things struck me by this:

1. Whilst both these figures can be criticised as being only "finger in the air" – how many companies can, even if they choose not to say, actually place a value of their own asset (excuse me if I don't put email list, database etc but lets call it what it is)

2. Given that they can value this asset do they treat it as such i.e. regularly measure it, manage it, and through a structured process aim to improve it !

Over 2008 I monitored the number of emails I received from 24 companies (I registered but then did not open). Have a look at the monthly figures but the difference was stark.

• One company emailed me 105 times in the year!! This suggests that they are either very persistent, very optimistic or not listening to the feedback they should be getting ?

• Others emailed hardly at all – I opted in and they failed to deliver !

"The time has come when advertising has in some hands reached the status of a science" - Claude Hopkins wrote in 1923, but my experience over 2008 suggests not all hands !

If companies do not go beyond a "never mind the quality feel the width approach" i.e. How big as opposed to how valuable, they will be unable to have communication that is relevant both to their customers and their corporate goals.

In discussion with various delegates at a recent Ready Steady Email event, feedback suggested that people are starting on the route to email equity but it still has some distance to travel. However the sooner companies start the sooner they should get there!

I'd appreciate your thoughts.

Stefan Elliot
Six Serving Men