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.

In this month’s Infobox:

• In the second part of our email testing series, Susan Young from Screwfix Direct provides a practical guide on how to test subject lines
• Put yourself in your readers’ shoes, advises Sara Watts, Director at Data Media and Research (DMRi).
• Just because someone hasn’t clicked through from your email, it doesn’t mean they’re not interested says Skip Fidura of dotAgency.
• Rupert Harrison from TBWA gives a Camper email the thumbs-up, not bad seeing as it was aimed at his wife!
• Read 10 of the most common delivery problem areas in the DMA’s Email Deliverability White Paper Review. (DMA members)
• Get tips on how to grow your email lists at the Email Customer Lifecycle seminar on Wednesday 25 May 2011.

Like what you’ve read? Then why not subscribe to receiving Infobox directly into your inbox?

Kath Pay, Editor, Infobox
Strategic Consultant, DM Inbox

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’
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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’

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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.

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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.

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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)

In this month’s issue of Infobox, Stephanie Miller addresses some of the reasons why good email gets marked as bad.  Even the most respected brands have some email message blocked by the spam filters – in fact, about 15 to 20% of permission-based, legitimate email marketing never reaches the inbox*.

The ISPs like Yahoo!, Gmail, T-Online, Orange and Free.fr now require marketers to do more to be considered “good.”

In this webinar organised by The Email Marketers Club, you’ll learn what the ISPs are saying is important for marketers if they want to get their messages delivered to the inbox.

Speaker: Stephanie Miller, VP, Global Market Development, Return Path

Moderator: Tamara Gielen, independent email marketing consultant, author of the email marketing best practices blog Be Relevant and founder of the Email Marketer’s Club

When: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 11am EST
(8am PST, 5pm CET, 4pm GMT)

The first 10 people to register using our special discount code of DMAEMAILBLOG will get to attend this webinar for free!

To find out more or to register for this webinar click here

 The wintry weather has given us all plenty of un-expected “down-time”, whether waiting in hope on snowy station platforms or huddled around an open fire with our families. Rather than succumb to the clutches of Cabin Fever I have been thinking about the “big wins” that treating customers differently delivers email marketers. With that in mind, here are some suggestions for treating people differently to reflect their unique registration, transaction and click-stream profiles.

Acquisition tools – if you’re renting data, ask the list owner what variables they hold and then deliver different versions of the same message. For BtoB that should be different subject lines, opening paragraphs and calls to action based on “job function” or “industry sector”. For consumers you may know their lifestyle and affluence from geo-demographic variables that list owners like Acxiom hold…have different propositions for less affluent and older prospects or use a different creative for young professionals. Let you imagination run free!

Conversion - as digital marketers we sit on the most valuable real-time prospect data so let’s use it. Who clicked on an email link but did not complete a successful outcome? Who looked at deep product pages on your site but did not buy? These re-marketing campaigns should deliver 4-16 better conversion rates than one-size-fits-all messages so start building them.

Retention – send different message programmes to your newer customers, or have a different tone of voice for purchasers of specific products. Build “personas” to help with your tone of voice, imagery and calls to action.

Re-activation – how do you know when you’ve lost a customer? Probably when they’ve not bought for a specific time period. So develop a “win back” programme with the first message triggered by a “date of last purchase is more than 60 days”. And be relevant…”we’ve noticed that you have not bought from us for a little while….” is a good start.

These are certainly not new or radical ideas, but it is surprising how few campaigns in my in-box are trying to follow these rules. Now that the dust has settled at the end of a demanding 2009, and whilst UK PLC is slumbering in icy grasp of winter, we should be using this precious time to develop relevant, engaging segmentation and personalisation strategies. Happy New Year!

Chris Combemale and David Hughes, Co-founders The Email Academy

The Daily Telegraph runs a Business Club feature every Tuesday, in a which a company presents a problem that they are currently grappling with, and a panel of experts then provides their recommendations on what steps should be taken to resolve the problem in question. The week before last’s edition was a particularly interesting one for our industry – Via-Vox ( the company behind the Powwownow conference calling solution ) has a significant issue with email deliverability. The full story can be found at :

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/businessclub/technology/6589059/Business-Club-Conference-call-company-Via-Vox-losing-customers-due-to-junk-email-filters.html

This is obviously a major problem for Via-Vox. It is not just a question of their marketing emails ending up in the junk folder. Even their transactional emails – vital in terms of carrying login and pin number details for an upcoming conference call – are regularly failing to deliver.

The real eye-opener for me was the responses from the “expert” panel. Some of the points that they raised ( or failed to raise ) that particularly stuck in my mind included :

• One of the panel made the statement that email deliverability is a subject that “most companies are only just waking up to.” That left me gob-smacked – I’ve been involved in email marketing for the past 10 years, and I can’t recall a time when delivery rates were not a key success metric for e-marketers.
• Not one of them touched on the subject of sender reputation. Given that a good set of sender reputation metrics now plays a role in three out of every four decisions that are taken on whether to process or reject inbound emails, all of the other recommendations that were put forward ( authentication, spam filter testing, embedded images ) – while important – are secondary. Sender reputation trumps them all in terms of importance for email deliverability.
• While all 3 members of the panel referenced the importance of email authentication, not one of them mentioned Domain Keys Identified Mail ( DKIM ) – something of an oversight given that particular importance of this form of authentication when broadcasting to BT/Yahoo! addresses.
• There was also quite a lot of focus on “spam trigger words”. In my mind, this is an increasingly irrelevant subject. Key spam filters such as Spam Assassin and Barracuda operate weighted scoring systems that will not reject an email simply because it identifies a text string as having spam-like attributes. In any case, the knowledge bases that contain these words are continually updated, so there isn’t really such a thing as a definitive list. And the chance of a transactional email containing enough spam trigger words to cause the email to be blocked is remote to say the least . . . !

I spoke to the Technical Director at Via-Vox after the article had been published, and he was in agreement, saying “we’ve already implemented most of this – they haven’t really told us anything we didn’t already know. It was a good article from a PR point of view !”

What this really flags up for me is the completely “moving goalposts” nature of the technological issues that affect the email marketing industry. Intelligence that was 100% correct 12 months ago is quickly out of date, and it is a major challenge for e-marketers to stay abreast of the key factors that ensure that their campaigns will be successful. While there is no shortage of white papers and best practice documents that are available for them to refer to, they are quickly out of date.

The DMA’s Email Marketing Council recognises this. The existing deliverability white paper ( published in 2007 ) is currently being revised by the EMC’s Legal, Data & Best Practice hub. It will be a considerably different document to its predecessor in terms of the issues that it focuses on, as will be seen when it is published in January 2010, and the intention is for it to provide its readers with common-sense, practical, and ( most importantly ) up to date guidance on how to deal effectively with the latest email deliverability obstacles.

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”.

It’s no surprise that 97% of online marketers use email. It’s one of the most measurable marketing channels, with a host of measurable data available to track the success of campaigns, such as open rates, click rates, deliverability and sales conversions.

Few channels give marketers the opportunity to deliver personalised marketing messages in the way that email does, so there’s no doubt there are significant returns to be gained for marketers who invest time and resource to build email marketing activity around customer profiles, preferences and behaviour.

But there’s a key point I’m missing here.  Marketing is not just about one channel and, as much as I can wax lyrical about email marketing, its true potential will only be realised if we integrate this form of marketing with other digital activities.

Email works so naturally alongside most other marketing channels, in terms of driving both customer acquisition and retention, but marketers  haven’t always given this fact their full attention.  However, I’ve noticed that the current economic times are encouraging many marketers to reassess their entire marketing spend to make sure they are achieving maximum ROI.

By using email in parallel with other marketing channels, marketers are realising they can obtain the accountability they need.

No where is this more clear than by integrating email marketing with your website for example, and blending the two channels to drive click-throughs to your site and capture data to inform future mail marketing campaigns.

Social media is becoming increasingly popular and is a great driver of email best practice.  Review your communication and ask yourself why anyone would add your email content into their social network. They would have to find it interesting, relevant and compelling. But this won’t happen by accident so time needs to be taken to segment and target, what we call ‘narrowcasting’ rather than broadcasting.

Relevancy, as we know, equals results, but the added upside of spending more time to achieve this is that, should a recipient decide to add your email to their social network, you are now getting your message in front of their peers, who share commons interests and are therefore much more likely to find your email relevant.

Tap into these networks by providing links to social networks in your emails and allowing recipients to quickly and easily share the content virally. Including a subscribe link in your emails, can also become a quick and easy way to build your list full of engaged users.

Email marketing also works very well with Search and SMS, in terms of aiding acquisition by providing vehicles that very quickly let potential recipients add themselves to your mailing list.

With a whole host of marketing channels now available, today’s marketers are missing a trick if they don’t look to blend their efforts to maximise ROI from their budgets. For this reason, as chair of the Partnership Hub of the Email Marketing Council (EMC), I am delighted to tell you that much work is ongoing in not only partnering with other organisations such as the IAB with our Ready Steady Email (www.readysteadyemail.co.uk ) event, but also in partnering with the other councils at the DMA.

The EMC will be putting together events, best practise guidelines and case studies to demonstrate how best to integrate email with the other channels, so watch this space for news and updates on these initiatives.

Most email clients block email images from unknown senders by default. So best practice advice for the use of images on email (particularly large ones that appear in the preview pane) is to avoid using them if at all possible.

If you do have to use images the general recommendation is that you use them sparingly, making sure you use carefully thought out Alt Tags AND text descriptors for the images. Other design techniques used to compensate for the image being blocked include, putting text behind them and using collapsible boxes.

So why so many companies persist in sending image only emails with no ALT Tags?

The short answer is that for some brands and markets – Fashion for example, images are integral to the sell, so they have to be used. However it is much less easy to understand why such great brands, with significant email budgets and very smart people working on their campaigns completely ignore best practice advice when it comes to ALT Tags etc. Surely their results must be adversely affected!

It would appear not. Analysis conducted by my company into the impact of images on client campaigns reveals a very interesting phenomenon.

Emails such as Email-Worx our own newsletter that is optimised for image blocking generate clicks from people who did not “open” the email. We typically find that around 3% of the clicks do not have a corresponding open (false negatives).

By comparison emails that use lots of or consist entirely of images generate fewer clicks without opens. In fact the harder it is to decipher the content of an email with images blocked the lower the incidence of false negatives!
 
It would appear that by withholding any information about what is in the email until images are downloaded, brands are able to get more of their subscribers to download their images. A very important tactic for brands that rely on creative to sell! Clearly this is only likely to work if the email is about a product their subscribers desire or are highly engaged with the senders brand.

So does this mean that you can ignore best practice and start to use images with impunity?

There's no right or wrong answer to that question, in our experience an approach that is highly effective in one market may not work for another. However we believe that marketers have 3 options and in the most recent issue of the Alchemy Worx newsletter we provide examples of how brands use images and discuss how images can be used in greater detail.

Here is a quick summary of the article.

Fully optimised for image blocking

Email designed in such a way that the content of the email is easily decipherable and downloading the images makes very little difference.

More suited to:
• Products and services that are not reliant on visuals
• Emails where content is the value proposition
• Transactional or update emails
• Newsletters
• B2B

Optimising for creative driven or image only emails

Emails designed to have little or no value until images are downloaded.

More suited to:
• Products and services that are highly visual
• Brand building
• B2C
• Building Desire
• Price indifference

Optimising for both

Emails designed to “sell” with images blocked, but look more appealing with images downloaded.

More suited to:
• Products and services that are quite visual
• Retailers with many product lines to promote
• Groceries
• Price sensitive products and discounting

There you have it! If you are more likely to sell to a person who has seen your product or creative than a person who hasn't you may be able to maximise the number of people who download your creative and generate more sales by completely ignoring best practice.