If we open an email it doesn’t necessarily mean we’re engaging with the message or the brand. That’s why it takes more than open and click rates to measure subscriber engagement, as Dr David Chaffey points out.
As the year draws to a close, James Bunting does a spot of crystal ball gazing for us email marketers, and it seems the future’s bright.
Email is still the core communication for ASOS. Back in January, I found its email designs lacking, with key messages hidden when images were blocked. ASOS has since totally revamped its designs and is now making the most of all that email has to offer. That’s why it’s this issue’s ‘Campaigns we like’.
But before we say goodbye to 2011, come join David Chaffey and myself at Fusion Marketing Experience where we will be sharing insights and giving master classes on how to improve your marketing efficiency and the all-important ROI.
Kath Pay, editor, Infobox
Co-Founder, Plan to Engage
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In 2011 a study on how consumers interact with brands via email and social media was commissioned, which reminded me of the importance of digital marketers integrating their marketing channels effectively.
Some key statistics were uncovered by the study, which marketers across Europe can capitalise on to interact and engage with their consumers within their preferred method of communication. Interestingly, of the European countries sampled, (France, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands and the UK), it was the UK that had the highest number of respondents ‘liking’ brands’ Facebook pages with 33%. In total a third of Facebook and Twitter users in the UK ‘like’ brands – more than double the number in the other European countries. In other countries less than 16% of users were signed up as ‘fans’. This highlighted the different levels of engagement with social media across Europe.
Email marketing was found to be the most popular digital channel with an average of 83% of respondents being subscribed to receive newsletters. Respondents from Germany, France and The Netherlands were the most likely to be reachable only via email, whereas in Spain, Italy and the UK, integrated communications, including social media, were the preferred method of communicating with brands. Across all respondents 95% said they check their emails at least once a day and 75% said they use email to receive social network notifications.
For me, the most important issue that marketers need to understand is why people are behaving a certain way via social networks and email, and effectively integrate the two channels to maximise ROI, rather than treating them as separate entities. Only 18% of all consumers said they only use email with the majority preferring to use a combination of channels. The study uncovered that there is currently a large gap between what consumers want and what marketers are delivering.
Due to the extensive amount of information gathered, this infographic has been produced to display all of the information and summarise the key takeaways.
In light of these statistics, are you tailoring your strategy to ensure you are occupying the right channels or driving your consumers to your desired location from the networks they favour?
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 3rd 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.
If you have read or listened to any commentary on email marketing in the past two years, you have most certainly witnessed some version of the now-popular script I call, “In Defence of Email Marketing”. The decrees from on high have repetitively predicted the imminent decline, or worse yet, the eventual death of email marketing in the growing presence of social media, mobile marketing, and other emergent channels. But, despite that commentary, month on month, year on year, our experiences defy those decrees and largely prove that email marketing is not only alive and well – but thriving!
In fact, I would argue that social media in particular has done more good for email marketing than any other technological advancement in the past decade. And the proliferation of smartphones is creating another positive change for our beloved medium. We have labelled this new world “Mocial” marketing (a bit silly but also a bit catchy, right?!?). It represents the intersection of Email with Mobile, Social and Local marketing channels—all working together to increase the impact of the other.
So the key for email marketers lies not in preparing a proper funeral for our channel, but instead, in learning how make our programmes thrive in this new environment.
5 Ways Email Marketing is Thriving in a “Mocial” World:
- Email is More Viral than Ever. With new integrations between email vendors and social media platforms, email marketing is now more viral than ever with offers and content that can easily be shared across any number of social networks. And better yet, in many email systems sharing and downstream viral activity can be measured and attributed back to the original recipient – helping marketers identify what social networks are most impactful and who in their database is their most ardent brand evangelist.
- Mobile is Creating an Always-On Connection. Smarthphones and tablets provide an always-on connection to consumers and prospects. Email is consumed at a faster pace than ever with consumers and business decision makers reading email on the go, connected and not, at all hours of the day, from all corners of the globe. Gyro HSR calls this the At Work State of Mind, and I think we will all agree that email and our work lives are with us for more hours each day than ever before in our lives.
- Triggered Email Creates Deeper Relevance and Real-Time Connections. Triggered emails and real-time alerts can be delivered with local offers triggered from check-ins and other location-based services – tying email marketing seamlessly into the world of location-based and on-premise marketing. The timeliness and the relevance of these triggered communications is higher than that of outbound programmes, and their triggered nature takes the guesswork out of when an email message should be sent and what content would be most valuable – the consumers behaviour is often telling you exactly what to send and when.
- Social and Mobile are Fuelling List Growth. Quicker email list growth can be achieved by using opt-in forms on Facebook company pages and by promoting newsletter options across various social channels. Email has always been a relatively poor (and often invasive) acquisition channel. By leverage social media and fan pages, marketers can now create cross-channel connections that allow social media fans and followers to more deeply connect with the brand through email opt-in.
- The Online and Offline Worlds are Colliding. On-the-go opt-ins are now possible with mobile apps, QR codes and text-to-opt-in campaigns. These new technologies allow consumers to opt-in to programmes and email communications from a variety of locations: from mobile applications on the handset to opt-in campaigns on billboards and bus stops. With Internet-connected mobile devices, consumers are now only a text or scan away from opting-in to email communications and connecting with your brand – turning historically brief advertising impressions into long-lasting online relationships.
I’ve been hearing the phrase email cadence a lot lately and its sometimes been confused with frequency. So let’s look at how frequency and cadence differ and how to set them.
Ring-ring
If you’ve not heard a traditional UK phone ring it sounds like this
That’s a rhythmic pattern of 0.4s ring, 0.2s silence, 0.4s ring, 2s silence, which then repeats.
The cadence is the rhythmic repeating pattern and the frequency is how often it repeats. In this case the frequency is once every 3 seconds.
What does this mean in terms of email marketing?
Often there are several independent streams of email activity running concurrently and these different streams beat together to form the cadence.
Take a scenario of an offers email being sent every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a newsletter email on the second Thursday in the month and a tips email every Tuesday, then the individual frequencies are monthly for the newsletter and weekly for the tips. The timeline for all activity is shown below (offers in blue, tips in red and newsletter green bars).
The same pattern of emails or cadence is repeated every four weeks, so the overall frequency is every four weeks.
If you have automated sequences of triggered emails for welcome, post purchase, abandoned basket and so on then these are overlaid too.
Setting a contact policy
When setting your contact policy for cadence and frequency think about:
- Setting a minimum time between emails.
- Setting a maximum time between emails.
- Prioritisation or suppressing scheduled sends during triggered sequences.
- Set many emails on average per month are received per customer.
Having a contact policy like this also means that you can set a clear expectation at time of signup, which will reduce spam complaints and improve deliverability. Daily emails need not be an issue, if that is the expectation.
Make it a user preference?
Should you offer individualised contact policies as a user preference? I don’t believe it always makes sense and this will be the topic of my next post.
Acknowledgements: My thanks to @jvanrijn as it was my recent conversation with Jordie that persuaded me there was value in writing this article.
Deliverability remains one of the most discussed challenges in the field of email marketing, so I think it rightly deserves its place as the most written about and talked about area of the business for beginners and experts alike. As inboxes evolve and their sophistication continues to increase, new approaches to email marketing programmes are needed to ensure that legitimate opt-in email is not only received – but anticipated.
The Evolution of Email Deliverability:
1. The Dark Ages of Email Marketing. In the early days of email deliverability was a free-for-all. Email messages from personal contacts, brands and spammers flowed freely to inboxes.
2. The Vigilante Years. Soon thereafter blacklists were formed to keep a record of notoriously bad senders, and those lists which are still in use today are often a form of self-policing by the Internet community.
3. Reputation 1.0. The next evolution in deliverability was based on reputation – more specifically IP address reputation. ISPs maintain a list of abuse complaints, hard bounces and other unsavoury characteristics of sloppy senders to penalise those individuals and companies whose practices prompt cries of help from recipients.
4. The Intelligent Inbox. With a few hops, skips and jumps in between we currently find ourselves in a world where meeting those previous bare minimum requirements may get your message into the inbox, but it will likely not get your message viewed, read, or acted upon. In this world:
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a. Inboxes are being prioritised intelligently to separate bulk email from more personal, bi-directional interactions. (See Gmail Priority Inbox)
b. Recipient behaviour and interaction with messages are helping inbox providers determine message placement and overall delivery.
c. New tools in today’s inbox make purging messages and banishing non-relevant senders and brands to the Junk box one-click easy. (See Hotmail Sweep)
3 tips can help improve your deliverability in the world of the intelligent inbox:
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1. Acknowledge that engagement is the key to the kingdom. ISPs and inbox providers often vary in the approach they take to determine message delivery, but nearly all are beginning to focus on one consistent measure of whether a sender is reputable or not – and that is ENGAGEMENT. In the world of the intelligent inbox, consumer engagement with your email marketing messages is critical to continued email deliverability. Recipient opens, clicks and forwards are becoming as much a predictor of relevance and authenticity as unsubscribes and complaints are to abuse.
Focus on creating messages that drive engagement and activity and you’ll be well on your way to improved deliverability.
2. Meticulously monitor your online reputation. Spammers burn through IP addresses as they plague consumers. And whilst that practice of provisioning a new IP address and opening the floodgates used to fool the system – it can no longer. Reputation is a hard-earned and constantly-monitored reflection of your email marketing habits. And, increasingly, it is being tied not just to IP address but to your domain and the infrastructure through which you send your messages. Monitor your reputation relentlessly; Have your email provider prepare regular reports for you to help you monitor the reputation of your IPs and sending domains; Or, use third-party services to assist. Most importantly, respond quickly to any fluctuations in your online reputation.
Your online reputation is as important as your credit score. Monitor it continuously and respond to any fluctuations promptly.
3. Authentication must be at the core of your efforts. Sounds geeky, but it is a foundational element of deliverability. Either your company or your email service provider should have your sending domains properly configured for a range of authentication services currently in use, including: Sender Policy Framework (SPF), SenderID, DomainKeys and DKIM.
Authentication technologies are similar to your passport or biometric scans – they help prove to ISPs that your company and your email messages are who they say they are. Do yourself a favour today and ask your technical team or your email service provider to verify which authentication schemes you are currently provisioned for. And, if any of the four boxes above are left unchecked, take quick action to get that authentication in place.
There are plenty of useful resources out there for learning about email marketing and you can read them to your heart’s content but sometimes, there’s no better way to learn than to get out there and get your hands dirty.
But, rather than taking risks and pushing the envelope with your own monthly newsletter, which can be daunting and potentially disastrous, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a safe environment where you could throw ideas out there, learn from you peers and get insight from industry leaders on all your email woes?
Well, good news, dear reader – the DMA and IAB’s latest “Ready Steady Email” Event is coming up this December in London and provides all of the above. Held in central London, attendees from all industries are put into teams and compete against each other to create an exceptional campaign, with top digital marketing professionals on hand to provide insight, judge the entries and, ultimately, pick a winning team.
It’s all about a hands on experience – there are plenty of opportunities out there to sit and listen to people give you advice but Ready Steady Email is all about getting your hands stuck in with a morning of activity and interaction.
Sounds good right?
Head over to book your place and check out the details below for exact dates and location. Look forward to seeing you there and may the best email-marketer win!
WHEN?
Wednesday 14th December, 08:45 – 13:00
WHERE?
IAB Offices, 14 Macklin St, London, WC2B 5NF
MORE INFO?
Send us an email or get in touch with Anna on 0207 050 6969 or anna@iabuk.net.
I saw a great infographic recently on the importance of email (see below). What really hits home here is that the industry buzz centres predominantly on social media, yet email – “the workhorse of the connected world” – is still used far more than both facebook and twitter put together. There are now more than 2.9 billion email accounts in the world and a staggering 188 billion messages sent daily. Compare this with twitter (140 million messages per day) or facebook (a mere 60 million daily updates). As this infographic shows, “Email is the most used, most valuable and highly prized real estate on the Internet. This is why everyone wants it. Enough said. (click here for a larger version)
Now that’s all very interesting on a global perspective, but what about in the UK? Well, looking at the latest findings from the DMA National Email Benchmarking Report (H2 2010), there is still significant growth in the email channel, in fact +35% in the second half of 2010.
Aside from factors like seasonality, which you would expect, it was also good to see that almost 20% of the volume increase was attributed to the effectiveness & ROI of campaigns that ESP’s were delivering to their customers. More consumers, it seems, are also signing up to receive emails, with increased list size being another key factor in volume growth (+7% in database size from Q2 to Q3, and +3% from Q3 to Q4).
There is more good news: both open and click rates were higher than for the same period in 2009, and click-throughs from email to websites delivered impressive increase vs. 2009 of over one third. (16.1m vs 12m).
The key challenge moving forward is going to be how to retain these results. The ‘more is more’ approach will deliver more traffic to websites from email campaigns but this can be supplemented with more advanced tactics for targeting the booming number of recipients. However, with all the talk about the importance of relevance and personalisation, there has been less headway in 2010 than expected in terms of implementation of more sophisticated segmentation, automation and triggered content. The biggest reasons for this? – The usual suspects: perceived effort, time and resources – plus of course data constraints.
With a growing number of emails vying for attention in our inbox, not to mention the increased channel fragmentation, email marketers are going to have to keep working hard to deliver good content & value in their emails, and to continue to improve their segmentation and 1 to 1 marketing.
The H2 2010 Email Benchmarking Report also features the latest data on strategy and segmentation, as well as open rates and deliverability. You can download the study here (DMA members only) and see the news release here.
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