When it comes to using Social Media for marketing, the words “relationship” and “conversations” often come to mind. This is of course no different to the approach of the best email marketers. They understand the need to deliver content that builds a relationship and maintains engagement over time. In the same way that people can become emotionally unsubscribed to your email list, your fans can learn to ignore your tweets and your Facebook pages.
Given this similarity, it is no surprise that most of the content used in your email programmes are often also right for your social network programmes. Your fans and followers are also interested in your interesting tidbits, how-tos, special offers and anything else that causes your customers to give up some of their valuable time to read your messages. The only way to achieve this coherence in message and tone is to have the same people who deliver your email programmes also deliver this content through the social networks.
Mat Braddy, CMO at Just-Eat (the online takeaway company) has given an interesting interview over at IMedia UK in advance of their session at ad:tech London next month which illustrates how they have implemented this approach and generated a fan-base on Facebook larger than Dominos (you can see their fan page here.)
It would be interesting to understand how much of that fan-base actually interacts with the brand itself as the size of your fan-base is only one of the metrics that should be monitored. Some of the other metrics worth understanding is how many fans comment, how many click through and how many share the content with their friends.
The plot of the science fiction film ‘Inception’ centres on the interesting concept of planting ideas in the dreams of the unwitting dreamer, the objective being that so that when the ‘dreamer’ awakens the idea is freshly planted in the subconscious.
This imaginative concept set my mind racing on which ideas, specifically related to deliverability I would plant in some marketer’s minds as key thoughts so that when they awaken the ideas might crystallise during waking hours:
1. Move away from the thought process that all emails that are sent make it into the inbox. Not true! In fact, ISPs, filtering companies and consumers all block, filter and report email as spam, meaning that only a subset of all mail sent is actually delivered to the inbox.
2. Focus on improvements; be obsessive about understanding what the metrics are that can improve overall response, start to think about Inbox Placement Rates (IPR), seek to improve, make it a KPI. Challenge all comers who state ‘delivered’ or ‘accepted’ is a reliable guide to what makes it to the inbox, because it is not. The fundamentals of reliable calculations require the accurate use of a broader collection of metrics.
3. Think about deliverability, not as a terse-technical subject dominated by those responsible in the technical team, or that someone else worries about so they the marketers don’t have to .Think about it as something that everyone in the organisation should be aware of and have some insight of.
After the dream the marketer will awaken with these three thoughts at least somewhere in the mind and when met with the word ‘deliverability’ their eyes won’t glaze over or worse still ignore one of the most important aspects and barriers to success.
Richard Gibson, Channel Relationship Manager at Return Path and Chair, Email Marketing Council. Twitter: @RichardGibson.
Tailoring your content according to what you know about subscribers can boost response. Here’s what you need to know…
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.
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.
I regularly remind marketers to go back and check that all the building blocks are in place in order to have a firm infrastructure to have the data to use the technology available at their finger tips. Data is the key to your success, and allows you to achieve those sophisticated aims and goals such as personalisation, segmentation and triggered and life cycle mailings.
With that in mind, I point to the subscribe form – an excellent cost-effective way to build an in-house database of pre-qualified leads.
- Create a subscribe (or opt-in) form that attracts sign-ups. Include details of what you will send, how often, a link to a sample issue and your privacy policy. Include carefully selected non-required fields that will help you understand where the lead is in the sales cycle so you can provide better content. Plan to test it too, just as you would a landing page.
- Start by placing the form prominently throughout your company’s website. Place it as part of any other forms you have on your website.
- Include a link to the subscribe form in each issue of your email newsletter.
- Put the information on your business card. Also, when you meet someone through networking or business meetings ask them if they’d like to receive your newsletter and sign them up. Follow up immediately with a welcome message reminding them why they will be receiving it.
- Have a “forward to a friend” function in your emails – and don’t forget to have a link to your sign up form as well!
- Put that link in all your social networking profiles. When you send a newsletter, publish its link to your streams, such as Twitter and LinkedIn.
- Create an email address specifically for signing up to the newsletter. Use it in all your printed material (e.g. bills, invoices or statements) – include it in your hold and voicemail messages.
- cross promote the newsletter through direct marketing material, as well as offline and online advertising.
- Have a signup sheet available at your trade shows stands. Also have a sign up form at reception.
- Use direct mail – if you only have physical addresses for your leads and/or customers, send them a direct mail with information on how to sign up to your emails.
denise cox is the Email Communications Specialist for Newsweaver. You can follow her on Twitter @denisecox
If you’re anything like me, then you’ll have been glued to the TV over the last month or so watching some of the greatest footballers in the world compete for that all important prize. But even if I hadn’t watched any of the World Cup, I’d only have to look at my inbox to know exactly what was going on.
That’s because over the last few weeks it seems as though every company under the sun has taken the opportunity to bombard its recipients with emails that ‘newsjack’ off the competition.
It’s a tried and tested marketing strategy and no doubt one that works very well for many companies. And yet, I can’t help but think that for some, the knee-jerk reaction to piggyback off the success of something happening out there in the wider world could be doing more bad than good.
Last week, we looked at a bunch of these World Cup emails that had come through and picked out a couple of the better ones. If there was one thing that really stood out, it was that some of the companies had obviously put a great deal of thought, care and attention behind their seasonal campaigns.
Don’t forget to target
The campaigns that were most successful were the ones that had clearly put in a great deal of advanced planning. Figleaves, for example, had launched a range of ‘England’ knickers – called Britnix! – a product that clearly suited its target audience while making the most of the World Cup.
And this really is the key point to remember when running campaigns like these. While it is tempting to jump on the bandwagon, it’s vital to hold onto all those tried and tested email marketing best practices. The central one of these, as demonstrated by Figleaves, is targeting. It’s only by targeting the email effectively that you will actually reach a recipient that is engaged and ready to interact with your message. And they will only do this if the seasonal event is of interest and relevant to them.
Tink is Managing Director at dotMailer. He blogs on the dotDigital Blog and you can also follow him on Twitter: @tinktaylor
One of the more unlikely celebrities to emerge from the recently completed football World Cup was Paul the Octopus. For those of you who are unaware of the background to this story, Paul lives in an aquarium in Germany, and has become an expert predictor of the results of the matches that feature Germany ( as well as correctly calling Spain as the winners of the final ). To assist Paul with the making of his predictions, aquarium staff would provide him with two clear boxes, with each having the flag of one of the competing teams affixed to its side, and a tasty titbit inside in the form of a mussel or an oyster. Whichever box Paul climbed into was treated as being his selection, and incredibly he ended the World Cup with a 100% success record.
I got to thinking that Paul’s predictions have a lot in common with email marketing. Think about it :
- There are differing outcomes associated with whichever box you ultimately end up in !
When Paul correctly predicted that Germany would lose to Spain in the semi-finals, German fans called for him to be cooked and eaten, while the Spanish prime minister jokingly offered to provide him with protection.Similarly, “inbox placement” is now widely regarded as a more accurate campaign metric than “delivered rate”. Campaign responses are markedly higher when the emails are getting delivered to a location where they will be seen, and responded to. E-marketers need to be challenging their ESPs to provide them with the reporting capabilities to see whether this is an issue that is affecting their programs. And if so, to implement the best practices that improves their inbox placement performance.
- Recognition plays an important role in delivering a positive outcome !
One theory about Paul’s astonishing success rate was that Octopuses, which are highly intelligent creatures, can differentiate between shapes ( apparently with a preference for rectangles ! ) as well as between contrasts in brightness. The German flag, which he chose 5 times, was therefore an obvious choice for him, except when presented with the even greater contrasts that were represented by the stripes of the Serbian and Spanish flags.Similarly, the typical inbox is a massively congested space right now, and consumers are more likely to respond to marketing emails when they immediately recognise the sender. E-marketers need to be careful to ensure that they maintain a consistent “friendly from” and that the subject line clearly explains why the email is worth opening. And with many recipients using some format of preview pane, making sure that this limited amount of real estate is able to effectively convey the sender’s brand and call to action.
- A good incentive is more likely to achieve the response that you are looking for !While Paul’s psychic capabilities are undeniably phenomenal, it is unlikely that he would have displayed them without the incentive of the mussel that was place in each box. Octopuses are equipped with sensitive chemo receptors on their tentacles and Paul, knowing that there was a tasty treat inside the boxes, was eager to engage.
Similarly, consumers are more likely to respond when they consider that a fair exchange of value is taking place. This doesn’t necessarily need to be in the form of a prize or a free giveaway either. Good content carries a value ( think moneysavingexpert.com ) and consumers will respond more readily to marketing emails that they think that they will benefit from. Email marketers will be rewarded by the application of even simple profiling and segmentation against their marketing audience so that they can consistently apply the marketing mantra of “right target, right message, right time.”
So what else does Paul the Octopus have in common with email marketing ? Cynics may respond that it is a case of having a highly intelligent brain at the centre of operations, which is attempting to control the behaviour of thousands of suckers, and sometimes coming unstuck in the pursuit of a few more squid !
However, I would prefer to tip my hat to Ringo Starr, who wrote Octopus’s Garden for The Beatles, after eating octopus for dinner, and learning from the ship’s captain that they travel along the sea bed picking up stones and shiny objects with which to build gardens. So the octopus analogy is with something that creates value without necessarily having an ulterior motive, that can take many different forms, that populates a variety of different channels, and that ultimately is capable of leaving a good taste in your mouth – just like well run email marketing program !
The innovative guys over at Litmus have extended their Fingerprint tool and added some pretty amazing email analytics to their tool. They tracked more than 4 million opens over hundreds of campaigns and found some interesting results. Out of those who opened the campaigns:
•On average, 51.1% of readers spend less than 2 seconds looking at your email
•In the best email campaigns, 77% of people fully read the message
•On average, 0.12% of readers printed the email
•On average, 0.63% of readers forwarded the email using their email client, not the ‘forward to a friend’ tool.
By simply adding some code to your email you can see whether they read, skimmed or deleted your email, as well as which email client they used. You can also see if they’ve forwarded (natural) or printed your email.
To be honest, I’m pretty excited at the thought of what can be done with these kind of analytics from my campaigns – ideal for continual testing and optimising. What an amazing marketing channel email is – to enable you to get metrics such as these!
Understanding why consumers are quick to withdraw the privilege of using their data for marketing purposes is not terribly complicated. However, the factors that lead consumers to entrust their data with companies in the first place, and how companies continue to retain the confidence of these consumers, are not immediately obvious. To close this knowledge gap, the inaugural DMA / fast.MAP Data Tracking Study provides an in depth analysis of why consumers share their details with brands. It also takes a look at the details they’re willing to share and what secures their confidence that the data holder is capable of storing their information safely and using it correctly.
According to the findings of the report, simple trust in the brand is by far the most compelling reason that consumers cite for their willingness to handover their details. Having a relationship of sorts with the customer also matters, as does providing a service the consumer regards as essential. People are most willing to share a broad range of details when buying products online than under any other circumstances.
Consumers are now fully aware of the value and vulnerability of their data – a fact which all too many brands have ignored at their cost. The biannual Data Tracking Study provides fascinating insight into what consumers think we are doing right and what we are doing wrong in using their data for marketing purposes.
The Data Tracking Study can be downloaded from www.dma.org.uk/research
(DMA Members only)
This month’s issue
In this month’s Infobox our lead author, David Hughes of The Email Academy addresses the concerns he has regarding marketers relying on ‘open rates’ as a valid measure of success of a campaign; News International’s Rupert Harrison assesses the future for cold email lists; Sara Watts of Data Media And Research looks at why claims made by some companies selling third-party data aren’t always what they seem; Skip Fidura of dotAgency tells us why he likes US shoe brand Teva’s Waterkeeper Alliance campaign; and in this month’s special report for DMA members’ eyes only, we take you through 10 ways to integrate your email marketing and social media.
It’s time to get tough on open rates, David Hughes, The Email Academy
Is there a future for email list rental? Rupert Harrison, News International
Third-party list rental: does size really matter? Sara Watts, Data Media and Research
Campaigns we like: Teva’s Waterkeeper Alliance. Skip Fidura, dotAgency
Special report: 10 Ways to Integrate Email Marketing & Social Media (DMA Members only)
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