Developing a good email marketing strategy can be a daunting task. To help you get some perspective, here are 3 key stages to keep you on track.

Develop a customer centric communications strategy.

I know this can be a bit of an overused statement, but to make the email channel work in the modern environment of priority inboxes’ etc it is vital. Focusing on the needs and motivations of the customer as they would relate to your brand is a great place to start. If you are going to be talking to the customer and expect them to engage, purchase or become loyal as a response, you’ve got to say the right things. This can’t be done at a campaign tactical level, when the heats on to get more sales to hit target; it needs to be part of an overriding communications strategy. This strategy will set out more than just how many promotional emails need to be sent to achieve revenue objectives. To develop this email communication strategy, these are some of the key elements.

• Understand how your customers perceive the brand and its products or services.
• Research the motivations and needs that engagement with your brand satisfies.
• Research the strengths that define your brand equity.
• Define your customer lifecycle and set business rules to identify where each customer sits.

Focus the strategy on increasing LifetTime Value

Once you have got a clear idea of your customer and the stages the customer goes through in their engagement with you (from discovery to defection), you can start to plan. One key objective of any email communications strategy should be to increase revenue by increasing customer lifetime value. Now, don’t think this is purely a retention statement, it equally counts for acquisition too.

Acquisition

If you’re going to be focusing on lifetime value, it will have an impact on which sources you target for acquisition. Customers coming from sources that provide a low lifetime value customer should be avoided, or the price you pay for acquiring the prospect should reflect their future value. In the case of an email address, they are not all worth the same, so the first task would be to identify sources of prospect email addresses that will provide good future customer value. A good place to start is to look at any results you have from past activity, and look at the overall sales achieved over time, from those customers.  The problem with email is that it is a cheap marketing medium that can be abused with little (apparent) cost implication. Good email prospect data, costs far more than poor quality prospect data, but can be far cheaper in the long term, as it produces good long term results.

Retention

Without the understanding of the customer (and you’ll only get this from the research suggested above) you won’t be able to sell to the customer what they want, how they want it. You’ll only be able to sell your product or service how you perceive it. Customer knowledge also allows you to tailor communications for each stage of the customer lifecycle. This will make your communications more relevant, more effective and more likely to meet business objectives. The strategy should be one that makes every marketing communication be seen as a positive experience by the customer, not a negative “interference” experience.   Ensure you do this by following these key rules:

• Define the commercial objectives for each stage of the customer lifecycle.
• Develop a customer communication plan that reflects the customer research and meets business objectives.
• Ensure research and testing is part of the strategy, to promote future development.

Make it part of a multi touch, multi channel strategy

In a connected world, where people are hooked onto the grid in multiple ways, touch points come via multiple channels. Just to take one example of a device, the smartphone can deliver a marketing message via email, web, social and SMS simultaneously. Studies have been suggesting recently that someone is likely to be watching the telly or walking round a store while access their phone, so the potential for cross media confusion abounds. Add this to multimedia spamming potential, and it makes integrated marketing communications essential for each channel’s success. Email has an important role to play in future direct marketing, with its unique strengths, it can only be effective as part of an overall cross channel strategy. Complimenting other channel activity, email often drives an uplift on other channels as well.

Taking a strategic approach to the email channel can bring lots more opportunity to the party, ultimately allowing customer knowledge to drive content, timing and targeting; nudging that little bit closer to true one to one marketing.

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How’s your email database doing? If it isn’t growing as fast as you would like, or worse, if it’s stagnant, it’s time to cast a wider net and look for subscribers in new places.

Naturally, your homepage is the first place to start your quest. Sure, you probably have an opt-in invitation there already, but you must do more than just slap up a data field and say “Sign Up for Our Email.”

Will visitors see it as soon as they land, is it placed in the valuable real-estate known as ‘above the fold’ and do you entice them into subscribing with the benefits they’ll receive?

Beyond your homepage, you should extend a subscription invitation to everyone you connect with – customers, subscribers, prospects and browsers – and everywhere they find you, whether it’s on your website, in your email messages, in your social networks and even offline.

You’ll have to invest some time and money, but it will be worth it. A growing, vibrant database is the lifeblood of your email program. Isn’t it worth a little loving care now and then? 

Finding More Subscribers in Online Places

Here are some prime online locations you might be missing:

1. Every internal page of your website, from product pages to your “About Us,” corporate information and privacy-policy pages, wherever visitors roam around your site.

2. Landing pages associated with external links, such as email or search campaigns, social network links or URLs posted in advertisements, on direct-mail pieces and other paper communications. Google has revealed that only 1 in 9 arriving on a landing actually ‘convert’ so what are you doing to capture the remaining 8?

3. Every social network where you promote your company or content. Here’s how you can attract subscribers in four of the world’s most popular networks:

Twitter: Link to your opt-in or preference-center page on your profile page, not just your homepage. Promote your latest email offer or fresh  newsletter content in tweets, and include an opt-in invitation, as shown below on my Twitter profile.

Facebook: Add a tab promoting your email content on your company Facebook page. Make it the default destination for any visitors who haven’t “Liked” your page yet as seen below with Anthropologie.

Brag about your email in your wall posts. Link to a special landing page that not just features the copy you’re sharing but also has a more prominent opt-in invitation that acknowledges where your visitors are coming from and invites them to sign up.
Also, customise the copy that appears  when people share  your content on their walls to include a link and opt-in invite.

LinkedIn: Create a company-specific page, where you can provide information, highlight key employees and cross-post email newsletters and blog posts. Add a benefit-based invitation, and link to your opt-in page.

Post your newsletter content in your relevant groups. The  numbers might be small, but you’re speaking to the very  people who are most interested in your content. Go for   it!

YouTube: Create a company page, and cross-post any videos you send out via your email newsletters or promos. Make a benefit-based opt-in invitation part of your company profile on the page.

4. The mobile Web. Checking email is the No. 1 activity on mobile devices. So, appeal to your mobile users in that channel. Use SMS (short code messaging) that lets users type four or five numbers to opt in to your email program.

Or, try using a QR (quick response) code that opens up a mobile-optimized opt-in page when a smartphone user scans it.

If you have a mobile app -this is also a wonderful place to promote your signup, as Angry Birds show us below.

5. Your own email newsletters. Suppose somebody received your newsletter from a friend? She’s a hot email prospect, so add an invitation where she’s likely to see it, up in the top third of the email message body. Code the opt-in link so you can track the source, too.

6. Transpromo messages. Turn transactional messages into transpromo (transactional/promotional) messages and reach out to your customers who buy, download or open accounts with your company but haven’t signed up for your messages. You already have their email addresses, but that’s not necessarily a signal to begin sending newsletters and promotional content.

Add opt-in offers to messages that are triggered by customer behaviour, such as these:

• purchase confirmations
• shipping notifications and related emails
• abandoned-cart reminders and other follow-up emails
• account and download confirmations
• payment reminders and confirmations

Invite Subscribers When They’re Offline, Too

Once you cover your online locations, it’s time to go offline. Email already connects all of your marketing channels; so, you should use all of your channels to prospect for new subscribers:

1. The shipping box: One online-only retailer adds a clever little opt-in invite in each package so that it’s the first thing the buyer sees when he opens the box.

2. Your call center: Taking email addresses over the phone can be tricky, but it’s another way to connect your offline customer to your email program.

3. The cash register: Capture the address when the customer is doing the most important thing: buying something from you. This takes some investment in training and in finding which method works best – telling the cashier, writing it on a postcard or typing into a POS kiosk.

4. All over the store: Print an invite anywhere the customer’s eye might stray or where they linger. You can publish the link to your opt-in page, use a QR/SMS for mobile opt-in, or both:

• On the receipt (both paper and emailed/texted versions)
• On a bag stuffer
• On store signs
• Outside the dressing rooms

5. Paper catalogues and sales letters: It’s the same idea as posting an invite on your landing page. Even if your recipients aren’t ready to buy, they might be intrigued enough to take a small step and opt in to your email.

6. Offline ads: If you link to your website in your ads, why not mention your email there too? Once again, you can post a link or use a scannable or SMS code to avoid mistyping.

7: Be creative: No one knows your business and your customers habits better than yourself. Think about key touch points which lend themselves to growing your list, as the napkin below with US Airways.

So, be sure to give your database growth the necessary time and thought required to make the most fo all your customer touch points – you will be greatly rewarded for your efforts.

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At the email evolution conference in Miami last year, Yahoo and Hotmail announced that they were looking at allowing dynamic content within an email. ISP’s are concerned about users leaving their site when they follow links in an email. The idea is that when a user clicks on a link they don’t leave the ISP’s site but the content of the link is displayed in the email. This was an encouraging sign that ISP’s would start allowing us to do more with our emails.

In Hotmail these are called Active Views. This basically gives partners the ability to run scripts within an email and produce true dynamic content. Such partners include YouTube, LivingSocial and LinkedIn. But what about the rest of us?

Email service providers talk about dynamic content all the time but this is in regards to personalising the message for individual recipients. When the email is actually sent it is very static.

The more sophisticated marketers can change images that are served to the email to make the email look dynamic. Suppose you are sending a campaign offering a promotion then ends on 1st Feb 2012. The main promotion could be in the form of a number of images. After the promotion has expired you can change the images that are served to say that the promotion has expired. Simple but effective. It is not 100% accurate but there are several companies around that will facilitate this for you if it is something you want to try.

However this still isn’t true dynamic content. What about if the HTML of the email actually changed within email client to give a different message? For example, if the email was promoting restaurant discounts then it might show you different offers depending on the time of day you read the email. Lunchtime offers around midday and Dinner offers later in the day. This could be extended even further to personalise based on your current location. If you read the email in the office then it would show offers for a restaurant round the corner from work. You then go home and look at the same email again and you would see totally different offers for local restaurants near home. The email itself has changed the content based on its location and time of day.

All this is technically straightforward and something you could do on a webpage easily. Many websites already personalise the content based on the country you are in. The difference is that email clients don’t allow background scripts such as JavaScript to run in an email as this opens the way for malicious code to be implanted and run without the user knowing. Active Views is the first step to allowing such scripts to run but in a very secure environment.

So how would dynamic content like this affect your email campaigns? Obviously more targeted content is going to lead to better engagement of the user but would varying content actually work? It may scare and confuse the recipient and lead to reduced click through rates. Only time will tell and I look forward to trying this when it all becomes possible. We will wait and see if anything else regarding dynamic content is announced next month at the email evolution conference in Florida.

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Do you spend time writing and preparing content for your email newsletters, crafting your newsletter, hit send – and then check it off as a finished campaign?  If so, you are missing a big digital opportunity to reach beyond the inbox and use your content to draw attention to your company and attract new subscribers.

It’s referred to as a ‘splash and drip’ approach. After you’ve emailed your newsletter and “splashed” all the content out to your subscribers, you can take a few more steps and expand your digital presence. First, promote the newsletter to your own social networks. Then, give your readers the tools to post your newsletter content to their own social networks. Now, extend the life of your newsletter by “dripping” individual content elements of the newsletter.

This content includes links to your articles, and event alerts, videos, graphs, podcasts and presentations within them. Post these newsletter links in your own social profiles, such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, etc.  When the opportunity arises, use relevant newsletter article links in your posts on discussion groups, as well as in comments on blogs. As I say, make sure it’s relevant to the topic – or worthy of starting a discussion with! Also, take advantage of social bookmarking outlets such as Digg or Delicious as places to post your newsletter or links within it. (Check out this article showing how social bookmarking can raise your SEO profile.)

P.S. Don’t forget to conduct an subscribe form audit to ensure people coming across your newsletter content via all this social activity can sign up to your newsletter.

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I’ve got to admit, I don’t like spam. Not just professionally, it really gets my goat personally as well. It’s not that I’m a particularly sensitive soul when it comes to email communications, but I just don’t like being sent stuff I haven’t asked for. Ok, I acknowledge that most of the downright illegal and virus laden traffic is now being successfully filtered by the great work of the spam filtering businesses and ISP’s, so what’s left to Grinch about?

Email is a powerful marketing channel, and its superb revenue driving potential is now becoming widely acknowledged. Email hasn’t got to this position by itself, it has needed to be understood and strategies carefully put together by some pretty clever people to bring it to where it is today. Some recent DMA reports show that the public now acknowledge email as a marketing channel that provides value. In anyone’s book that’s an achievement, and it isn’t as if everyone is using the same strategies. However the similar thing about all the successful strategies is they are done well, with considerable thought and great execution. So in a channel that is going from strength to strength, why am I throwing my presents out of the sleigh about spammers?

The most fundamental practice and legal obligation regarding sending someone a marketing email, is that you need to have the person’s permission to do so. I’m not going to start splitting hairs about the pros and cons of opt in opt out etc, but it is pretty widely acknowledged that the person should know what they are signing up for. But that’s right isn’t it, you don’t want anyone on your list who doesn’t want to be there, right?

And if they unsubscribe, it means they want you to stop sending them emails; so you stop, because it would be crazy to carry on, wouldn’t it?

So… why have I been sent marketing emails from a company I’ve previously unsubscribed from, with text saying “we’d like you to subscribe to our newsletter”. No thank you. I’ve unsubscribed once – isn’t that enough? Someone even sent me an email Christmas card that automatically signed me up to marketing emails!

Those are two examples from a very limited sample size. It is possible I have been very unlucky, but it does demonstrate this issue exists. It wouldn’t take long for the trust that has been built up with the public over the last few years to be eroded. At a time when we should be encouraging as many subscribers to sign up to our email communications, playing fast and loose with email permission is not the way forward. New European legislation threatens to make permission and data use more of an issue for the online marketer, we need to develop the public’s trust, not damage it.

With the revenue driving potential of the channel, it is easy to see how some could be tempted to go against the express wishes of their customers, in an attempt to drive a few extra sales. But in doing so marketers must consider the cost to their reputation.

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Okay, that might be a bit harsh. Perhaps the resolution should be: “I resolve to stop and take a breath before hitting the ‘Send’ button.” Maybe it is because we all spent a bit too much time in that strange place called Christmasland during December but there were some very high (and a lot of very low) profile errors during December that could have been easily avoided.

Starting with the high profile, the New York Times accidentally offered more than 8.6 million people a half-price subscription in an email meant for a few hundred, because they sent it to the wrong list (http://bit.ly/uHerov). It is one thing to send an email to the wrong list when it is about the same size as the one intended, but to be off by a factor of 10,000…!

Another much lower profile (in the sense that The Guardian did not write an article about it) but potentially just as damaging case occurred to a client who sent an email with some broken links and images. After the obligatory call to both Support and his account manager, we discovered that the client had sent a test message. Now you are probably asking yourself what we asked the client: “If you noticed that the links and images were broken in the test message, why did you send the email to your customers?” The answer was delivered without embarrassment or acknowledgement of the obvious: “We were under time pressure to get it out.”

So, for 2012 I ask all email marketers to do the following before each email Send:

1. Ask a colleague who did not help you write the email to proofread it. If a colleague is not available, use spouses, partners, the postman, or even English-speaking baristas.
2. Send a test message to a number of accounts on a number of platforms.
3. Go into each test message and make sure it looks as you intended.
4. On one of the test messages click on all of the links and make sure they go to the page you intended.
5. Think about the list you are going to use for the campaign and without looking at it write down the number of people you expect to receive the email on a piece of paper. This part is important because by writing it down, you will be less tempted to look at the number and convince yourself that it is right and you are wrong.
6. Now look at the stats for the list; are the numbers similar?
7. If you really want to be sure, pull a couple of random recipients out of the list to see if based on your segmentation you would expect them to receive the email.
8. Go make a cup of tea to give your brain a few minutes to catch your pending mistake.
9. Send your email.

I should also add that you should make sure you monitor the stats for your campaign while it runs its natural course but that is probably a separate resolution.

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On Tuesday 22nd November the DMA held its final breakfast seminar in the Email Customer Lifecycle Series, this time focussing on Win-Back. With over 80 delegates the seminar hosted keynotes from sponsors eDialog and a casestudy from Screwfix, as well as presentations from Tim Watson, Gianfranco Cuzziol and James Beauchamp.

Customer Win-Back – Protecting and Reviving Customer Engagement – Jill Brittlebank, Director of Strategic Services.

Approximately ¾ of your emails are going unread and communications through multiple channels are increasing, so how important is email really? In a survey to marketers by eDialog it was found that email ranked second (by 1%) to SEO as an excellent channel for ROI. Email has been consistently the top or second top channel for ROI since 2008. If ¾ of your emails are going unread, how do you define an inactive customer in a multi channel world and what role does email have in the purchase lifecycle of a customer.

Quick takeaways:-

• Once you understand the role of email in the purchase funnel for your customer segments, then you can improve the content of the emails you send to become more effective.
• Someone who is actively opening & clicking, even though not purchasing in the last year should be seen as active.
• The four types of Win-Back scenarios

o Reactivating inactive subscribers
o Reactivating lapsed purchasers
o Dealing with unsubscribes
o Dealing with invalid emails

• Prevention is better than cure – keep it relevant
• The 6 factors of relevance

o Segmentation
o Personalisation
o Lifecycle management
o Contact Management
o Interactivity
o Testing and Measurement

• Remember that if email isn’t the channel of choice give the customer another choice of channel
• Remember the ROI – it might be time for goodbye!

Re-lighting the flame – Tim Watson, Emailvision

The objectives of a win back program are to increase revenue, avoid deliverability issues and gain insight for causes for disengagement.
Key takeaways:-

• Identify your in-actives, learn how to separate the in-active and valuable from the truly inactive
• Remember that users don’t always respond with a click. Research from the DMA Email Tracking Study 2011 shows that many people actually go to the company’s website outside of the email.
• The time period of an inactive depends on your business
• A win back strategy can include the following steps

o Phase 1 – Insight survey
o Phase 2a – Win back
o Phase 2b – Win back follow up

• If the message isn’t working then change it! Use incentives, but don’t oversell

Keeping the flame burning – Email strategies to present losing a customer – Gianfranco Cuzziol

There are 3 key areas in keeping the email flame alive, they are sign-up, relevance and unsubscribe.

Key takeaways:-

• The sign up is very important at the start of your relationship with the consumer. Manage expectations, say thank you and make the process simple.
• Relevance is key in keeping the relationship burning.
• Define inactive. Were they ever active? Did they come from a competition? Did they ever get your emails? Check your inbox placement
• Remember nothing lasts forever – think about the natural lifecycle of your consumer
• Content and context are key
• Audit what device your customers are viewing your emails on, optimise your HTML accordingly
• Understand why the customer will unsubscribe, ask for feedback, offer to change frequency, offer another channel

Tested email strategies to win-back. The simple bare necessities – Susan Young, Screwfix
The four key areas for Screwfix win back strategies are Definition – Timescale – Relevancy – Messaging.
Key take aways

• Identify what defines a non active
• Define timescales – when is the right time to speak to your inactives
• How will you be relevant to all your inactives? Use geo targeting to enhance relevancy
• What messaging will you use – “We are sorry…” “What did we do to upset you..” “We’ve changed..”
• Start with the basics:-

o Segment your database into active & inactive
o Test timescales – 9mnths vs 12mnths etc
o Test relevancy/incentives
o Test messaging
o Test subject lines!

Win-back Campaign Examples – James Beauchamp, eDialog

James highlighted win back campaign examples from various brands including TJ-Maxx, Confused.com, British Airways and Dell.
Key take aways:-

• Who are our target audience?
• What is the desired response?
• What do we know about our in-actives?
• What else can we learn?
• What is in it for our subscribers?
• What happens after win-back?

In summary when planning a winback/reengagement strategy it is important to remember a few key points:-

• Identify and define an inactive dependent on your business. Understand the natural churn of customers
• Define your goals
• Think about the nudge affect of your emails on the customer, some people don’t respond with a click
• Learn from those who are inactive and why they have become so. Use this information to drive further strategy
• Test different creatives/subject lines/offers/content
• Remember that the more relevant your emails are earlier in the lifecycle the less inactives you will have
• Define a strategy for those you have won back and those who have remained inactive

Today’s event was a great end to the Email Customer Lifecycle series for this year. Next year the DMA will be bringing you this great series of events again, kicking off in April with “List Growth”. Thank you to all those who have contributed over this year to bring us some great insights, research, top tips and case studies on developing and strengthening our email customer lifecycle journey strategies. We look forward to seeing you all again in the New Year.

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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!

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