Every year we make them, but only occasionally do we keep them. New Year’s resolutions often represent our best intentions, which somehow get sidetracked as “real” life takes over and our time becomes filled with ticking items off “to do” lists and trying to keep our heads above water.

If you’re an email marketer, the same often holds true for the more strategic items on your list, which can be overlooked in an effort to get the next email out the door. However, as one of Return Path’s executives is known for saying, hope is not a strategy. Just wanting something to change doesn’t make it so. When thinking about the New Year’s resolutions you’d make for your email program in 2012, I recommend creating a realistic plan for sticking to these:

1. I will make time to test. This is a fundamental and essential best practice for any email marketer to follow. Without a testing plan, you simply won’t know the levers to pull to positively impact your email program’s performance. Instead, you’re just guessing as to what works, what doesn’t, what resonates and what misses the mark. Start by regularly testing the most basic email program elements with an A/B split test, like subject lines, and work your way up to multivariate testing of creative elements, like images, calls-to-action and landing pages.
2. I will define (and track) metrics to measure performance. What metrics are most important for measuring email program success? For most marketers this includes some combination of deliverability, open, click-through and conversion rates, but depending on your business model, your subscriber base and the desired responses you’re looking to generate from the email channel (i.e., purchases, leads, downloads, web traffic, etc.), creating a customized list of KPIs is essential for measuring trends over time. I continue to be amazed by the number of companies I come in contact with that are blindly sending email without any capabilities for tracking response rates.
3. I will be more focused on engagement. An email’s primary purpose is to drive an action. This can be anything from getting a subscriber to read what’s in an email, take a survey or walk them through a multi-step purchase process. But what about inactivity? Chances are you have a reasonably high percentage of subscribers who were once engaged and interacting with your messages, but have lost interest over time. These subscribers are likely deleting your messages without reading them or have set up rules to automatically route your messages to an “unimportant” folder, like in Gmail’s priority inbox. So what changed, when did it happen and, most importantly, why? Understanding what keeps your subscribers engaged over the long-term will be increasingly important for getting delivered to the inbox, staying there and maintaining high levels of activity.
4. I will reengage with my inactives. This is the next logical step. Stop focusing on list quantity and concern yourself with its quality. The health of your email program depends on it. Inactives can represent everything from true spam traps, recycled email addresses and unknown users to subscribers who once found your emails relevant and no longer do. Take action and remove the less than clean segments of your list that represent bad data or old data and create a strategy for reengaging with existing subscribers who are still valuable to your business.
5. I will monitor the competition. Standing out from the inbox clutter will continue to be a challenge as the volume of email increases, and this includes differentiating your brand and value proposition from your competitors. If your competition is incorporating features like geo-targeting, real-time inventory updates, offer count-downs in real-time, customized content and personalization elements into their email messages, what effect will that have on revenue and engagement, and how can you stay one step ahead? These insights are key as brands compete for subscriber mind-share in a crowded and increasingly mobile inbox.

As the saying goes, “even the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” However, committing to at least some of these New Year’s resolutions will ensure your email program is set up for success in 2012 and beyond. So, let’s toast to that!

A couple of weeks ago, before I flew to the States and entered into a turkey-induced coma, I shared with you some thoughts on five ways email marketing is thriving in a “mocial” world.  Well, as we all well know “thriving” doesn’t come without its fair share of challenges or effort. So, in that vein, here’s a look at five key challenges email marketing faces to stay relevant in a world intertwined with mobile, social and local marketing.

1. Focus on Deepening Relationships. The most savvy email marketers are adopting the long-held belief that email marketing is best suited as a relationship medium. Email programmes today are about adding more depth to customer relationships and expanding connections that already exist with the brand.  Use social media to create buzz and expand brand awareness. Use email to carry that first interest through the customer life cycle.

2. Design and Test for Multiple Devices. Email marketers face a design and testing conundrum with a myriad of new devices on the market. In fact, by the close of 2011, more than forty new tablet devices will have been introduced to the global market.  Email marketers need to make sure their messages are not only readable across of these different platforms and devices, but optimised for that experience.

3. Trigger Messages Based on Behaviour. Focusing on triggered and transactional communications allows email marketing to deliver an experience that can never be replicated in social media.  Real-time, behaviour-based communications triggered by a purchase, product shipment, event registration, etc. allow email marketers to connect with consumers with relevant information times precisely to the consumers interests.

4. Integrate Well with Mobile and Social. In order for email to thrive in this new world, it cannot live in isolation. Integration with social media for opt-ins is a must. And, design and optimisation for mobile devices is also critical.

5. Concise Messages and Focused Design is Key. Each month it becomes less likely that your email message is being read on a PC with a large, bright 19” display. Not only because Apple’s market share is growing along with monitor sizes – but because consumers and prospects are increasingly using mobile devices to triage and manage their inbox on the move.  The content, layout, and design of email messages needs to adapt to be more scannable, actionable, and designed for a touch experience.

The beauty of email marketing is that it never stagnates. Ever. The technology, practices and content strategy behind winning email marketing programmes is continuously evolving, and so long as it does, I believe email marketing has a bright and productive place in the marketing mix.  For now, we have a lot of work ahead of us to adapt our programmes to thrive in this new, Mocial world.  Let’s get started.

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.

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

How do you decide on the test cell sample size for email splits tests? I’ve often seen discussion about it being important to get right, but seldom seen information on how to do that. If you’ve been waiting for an answer on how to pick test cell size then this post is for you. By the end of this post you will know how to decide on your test cell size.

Sample sizes are all about statistics; fear not, you’ll get the information you need here without a formula in sight.

Let me start with an example of an A/B test using a sample size of 100. With a result of test cell A giving a 5% click rate and test cell B 6% then logically B is the winner. The relative uplift of B on A is 20%. That is a 1% increase on 5%, giving increase 1/5 = 20%.

Sounds great? With the sample size of 100, test cell A 5% click rate means 5 people clicked and in cell B 6 people clicked. Just one person difference. If just one person had gone the other way there would have been no difference between cell A and cell B, no winner, no 20% increase.

The result is termed not statistically significant. This means that the difference between the test cells is due to random variation and not because of a true difference in the effectiveness of getting the click.

Clearly jumping to a conclusion based on one person difference is totally unreliable. Of course a larger test cell is needed. But how much larger, should it be? 200, 300, 4000?

Help is on hand to allow you to decide your test cell sample size by using this simple table.

To use the table you need to know just two things:

• What is your normal response rate?
• What is the smallest difference you want to measure?

Your normal response rate
This is simply the normal click through rate you expect. If this is the first time for the type of campaign being tested then make an educated guess based on your other campaigns. Guessing on the low side will play safe with sample size.

Smallest difference to measure
The size of the difference in response between test cells affects how big the test cells need to be. You must trade off test cell size against the smallest difference in response that you want to know is a true difference, a difference that is statistically significant.

To help answer this question think about the level of bottom line improvement worth testing for and the cost of doing the testing. Typically its not worth trying to measure less than a 10% difference, for example, less than an increase of 5% to 5.5% is not interesting.

As data is a precious resource using the smallest possible test cell means more test cells and more tests.   Running more tests searching for a 10% or 20% increase is better than one large test cell that allows a 1% increase to be measured with statistical significance.

Using the table
Let’s say our normal click rate is 10%. In the test we want to measure if the click rate changes by 20% or more.  That is if it increases from 10% to 12% or more. First look down the left hand table column and find 10%, then look across to the column for 20%. This gives the answer that the sample size needed for each test cell is 2000. With this sample size you can be confident that any click rate change of 20% or more is a statistically significant result and not just randomness.

I’ve used click rate as the optimisation response metric throughout this post. The table and the same concept applies whether for open rate, click to open rate or conversion rate. You can plug those alternatives into the same table. Just remember if you use a click to open rate your sample size will be smaller. The sample in this case is the number of people who opened, not the number of people to whom you delivered.

Which metric you should use depends on the metric that best represents your marketing objective. Hint, that’s unlikely to be your open rate.

Should there be any students of statistics reading, you may wish to know the table above is based on a confidence level of 95%.

I hope that you are now better equipped and know better next time you hear someone saying ‘just use 10% of your list to test’.

Join us on June 15th, 6-8pm for the next in our Whitepaper events.

At this evening event we are launching two new white papers by the DMA Email Marketing Council that will help you take your email marketing strategy to new heights, giving you valuable insights into how to test and segment your data.

Data Analysis and Segmentation White Paper takes you through the different stages of segmentation from setting your objectives to deciding on the right form of segmentation (eg profile, behavioural, lifestyle).

DMA Email Council member Simon Bowker from eCircle wrote the white paper which includes ideas for quick wins.

Split Testing White Paperis a comprehensive guide to split-testing (taking a campaign and sending different versions of the same email to different people). It provides marketers with all the basics to run a split-testing program.

Sponsored by The Database Group (dbg), the white paper is written by DMA Email Council members Tim Watson from smartFOCUS and Guy Hanson of dbg.

dbg will also demonstrate all these findings in a recent and exciting case study.

This event is not to be missed by anyone who wants to achieve better results and put their questions to the experts. It is also an opportunity to enjoy a summer’s evening with others in the industry.

To find out more, click here

To book, click here

As a well-known sceptic of the less email = more revenue theory, I have always found it puzzling and somewhat insulting that members of the anti-frequency brigade assume that anyone who follows my advice will by definition simultaneously shut down their brains and start sending 100’s of completely pointless, ugly emails containing terrible offers or irrelevant content; while everyone who follows their advice will automatically start sending out works of art and be given a knighthood for their creative genius.

That’s just stupid!

What I advocate is that everyone who increases send frequency ALSO significantly improves their creative, targeting, offers and analytics. My point is simple – most companies expect their email
program to at the very least pay for itself. And to get budget or funding or additional resource you need to generate the cash to pay for it.

By far the cheapest way to do that in the short term is to increase frequency.

You then have a choice be stupid, bank the cash and send more and more crap or irrelevant email OR maintain or continue to  increase frequency for the long-term by re-investing the gain in GROWING your list and/or trying to deliver more value or as some would prefer “relevant” emails.

The inconvenenient truth is that all things being equal a 2nd email a month sent to the same list (even a resend to non-openers) will ALWAYS beat 1 email a month however well targeted and is without doubt quicker and cheaper to do.

The biggest returns in email come in order of priority from (again all things being equal and you don’t do anything stupid):

1. List size

2. Mailing Frequency

3. Offer value

4. Segmentation and Targeting

5. Deliverability

If I was to advise a client that wanted to increase their investment in email how to spend their money that’s what I would tell them. I would also point out that while frequency is the quickest and cheapest win, it is the most likely to suffer from diminishing returns and the most dependent on investment in the other tactics.

Ours is the only channel that promotes itself by telling the world less is more and that 1 email a year is better than 12. Can you imagine Radio and TV telling the world that 1 slot a night is better than 2 or Google telling you that to be effective you should buy less keyword or banners?

Take it from me a, marketer who tries to get customers and prospects to enjoy receiving more email will be more successful than one who spends time and money trying to find a way to grow their business by sending less email!

If you don’t believe that simple truth here is a simple test – go ahead and significantly reduce your email send frequency and see if any of your competitors follow suit.

Then start updating your cv.

Sat working in the sun with two five year olds, playing in the shade under the table I was sat on. I was intrigued about the conversation that happened.

Link; “why are these Army men red and Yellow?”

Sunny; “They are funny and would get killed very quickly, everyone knows Army men should be Green.”

The Army men were Yellow and Red because that was the only colour the shop had. The amount of time spent playing with them was slightly more than the green ones, the play was also more imaginative as they moved away from battles in woods to ones on the beach (quite handy if you are Yellow) and Jessica despite hating Army men was persuaded to play for a while (on the condition she was allowed to be the Yellow Army).

On first glance Yellow and Red Army men have very little to do with emails. However it does highlight the fact that you don’t have to always follow convention to get responses. A couple of weeks ago whilst trying to do several things at once I quickly put together an email to send to business people in the land of PR. I wanted to see if the idea had any potential before investing any real time or money into it. The email broke more than one of the best practice guideline (nothing illegal or against the code) but the creative was not that pretty, there was an attachment, the branding or design was poor and the subject line was very long however the response was fantastic with nearly 60% of the people it was sent to responding to it.

The point is that for the majority of the time I believe it is best to follow well tried techniques and learning’s. Follow the DMA guidelines, read and implement ideas from the white papers and guidelines from within your company. However every so often try something a little bit different, brake from convention and see what it does to your response. If it drops through the floor you know to go back to following the more conventional advice. But just as the Yellow and Red Army men got Link and Sunny to engage in a different way with them and gained a new user in Jessica you might strike lucky and gain a positive reaction.

Sara Watts – Data Media and Research

Sometimes in the midst of all the amazing advanced email technology available to marketers the essential building blocks in email are overlooked or not maximised:

It’s essential to remember that email marketing shouldn’t be a one-off marketing experience – it should be a repetitive process in order to build, retain or nurture relationships. To get the best ROI and results from each send, it is essential to follow the cycle of email marketing: Test. Send. Analyse. Change. Repeat.

Test – One of the most powerful aspects of email is how quickly you can get results from your testing. By testing elements of a mailing to a small group before you send you can make changes based on the results prior to mailing to your entire list. Test: send times, subject line, sender, day, time, call to action, clicks and conversions.

Send – Before you hit send check spelling, dates and you are mailing to the correct list. What is the best time for you to send? Test to find out! Rather than follow general industry benchmark stats, base your day/time send on your own list of subscribers and your products and services.

Analyse – A valuable element of email is its measurability. With analytics you can measure activities and behaviour of groups and individuals. These include: delivery rates, response and click rates, identified opens, new subscribers and conversions.

Change – Use what you’ve learned from analysing to make changes and better achieve your business objectives, whether they be revenue, retention goals or awareness. Segmenting out your lists based on this information will allow you to send more targeted (received by the right person), timely (coming at the right time) and relevant (containing the right information) emails to all of your subscribers. What can you segment by? Customers, leads, geographic or demographic and business sector are just a few possibilities.

Repeat – Email marketing is very cyclical by nature – it’s never ‘finished’. But that is the beauty of it, it’s immediate and measurable. Use each send as an opportunity to improve your message and the content you send the next time to your subscribers.

denise cox is the email communications specialist for ESP Newsweaver.com. She is a member of the DMA’s Email Marketing Council)

Email errors can be  a turnoff – don’t let mistakes affect your response

Even in the age of textspeak, instant messaging and social media chitchat, people still care about quality control in communications of an even slightly more formal nature. They may write “lol” and “CU tonite @ 8” on facebook or their mobile, but they don’t like it when spelling mistakes and errors creep into a letter from the energy company or even a restaurant menu. Or, come to that, a marketing email.

In these contexts, poor quality control can quickly undermine brand credibility and – as research repeatedly shows – even lead to loss of business. After all, would you give someone a job who couldn’t spell your name?

Many emails err alike…

Here at Alchemy Worx, we’re up to our necks in email. Hundreds of messages flood into our accounts every day as we monitor what’s going on in the world of email marketing. And guess what? Loads of them contain errors. And loads of those errors are the same. And all of them could easily be avoided.

To err is only human, of course, and often only too understandable. For most marketers, an email send means tight deadlines, quick turnarounds and last-minute changes. All of which can open the door to errors. But none of that will count for anything if a subscriber leaves your list in disgust because you’ve emailed them twice. And got their gender wrong both times. About an offer that’s already expired…

Catching the glitches

So what can be done? Increasingly ESPs are adding tools and functionality to help you avoid sending poorly constructed emails (after all poor emails can upset ISPs – relationships that good ESP rely on). But there are still some areas that even the best software struggles to catch. With our help, you can still fix that glitch and save the day…

How to avoid the top 6 mistakes your Email platform won’t spot