Join the DMA Email Marketing Council on November 22nd 2011, for the final breakfast seminar in our four-part Email Customer Lifecycle series at 15 Hatfields in London (map). In this series we have looked at list growth, conversion, retention and in this final seminar, sponsored by e-Dialog, we are concentrating on win-back.
Learn from the experts
Speakers will show you how to create a one-off win-back campaign for your inactive subscribers as well as an ongoing reactivation programme to prevent inactive subscribers.
Brands, including Screwfix, who have done both of these successfully and will present how they did these in two exciting case studies.
e-Dialog, will start off the morning with keynote presentation looking at win-back campaigns.
You then need to chose from two sessions:
Re-lighting the flame, tested email strategies to win-back
Tim Watson, Operations Director, Emailvision
This session will define just what is meant by inactive before moving onto how to effectively message to someone who is ignoring you. Real world tested examples are used and you will gain lots of ideas for your own win-back strategy.
Or
Keeping the flame burning, email strategies to prevent losing a customer
Gianfranco Cuzziol, Head of eCRM, EHS 4D Digital
This session looks at how we might spot when a customer is becoming less engaged with you and how you might try and get them re-engaged with ideas for your own retention strategy.
The morning will finish with a panel debate on these topics between our experts. You will also have the opportunity to ask them questions and mingle with your peers over coffee and breakfast.
Email: megan.hawkins@dma.org.uk
| DMA Member (inc VAT) | £ 0.00 |
| Non Member (inc VAT) | £ 30.00 |
What people said from the last session:
“ I found the overall information very useful and now have some great ideas to use for clients. I also learnt more about the industry in general and just how important it is and the effort needed to succeed.”
James Lovell, Email Marketing Consultant, dotmailer
“Very well organised, and being able to choose which session you attended helped to tailor the morning to you interests.”
Caroline Hutton, Junior Account Manager, Eclipse Marketing Ltd
As an email marketer, I’ve come to expect the unexpected. Something as arbitrary as the colour of a CTA button can boost your conversion rates.
In this issue of Infobox, expert commentator Mark Brownlow helps you squeeze more out of an A/B subject line test, by testing other elements within your email.
Guy Hanson from Return Path comes up with eight ways to improve your email unsubscribe process, while Sara Watts of Data Media & Research explains how to stop your email marketing from going bad.
Kath Pay, editor, Infobox
Co-Founder, Plan to Engage
Article: Five ways to make more of your A/B email tests
Article: Goodbye – hopefully forever!
Article: When good email marketing goes bad
Upcoming event: Email Customer Lifecycle: Win-back
Survey: The 2011 DMA National Client Email Marketing Survey
Like what you’ve read and want to read more? Why not sign up and have Infobox delivered to your inbox.
Due to the exponential growth of communication our day to day lives have become saturated with marketing messages. This makes it now so more important than ever for brands to create engaging, relevant email marketing strategies. Consumers are much more likely to shop online or send an email rather than use the phone. Therefore you’d expect brands, in particular retail brands to have perfected the art of online communication. It appears not.
At eCircle we recently conducted a study of thee top UK retailers to analyse just how effectively they used email as a method of communication. To carry out the study we signed up to all available newsletters from the Top 100 Hot Shops/Websites as listed by the IMRG and Hitwise.
The results we surprising with many brands failing to get even the email basics right.
Here are some of the results:
- Retailers that had option to sign up to newsletter but never sent any emails out: 19 per cent
- Retailers that failed to deliver regular email communications: 29 per cent
- Retailers that failed to send a welcome message: 60 per cent
- Retailers that didn’t have a newsletter sign up option: 10 per cent
- Retailers that had option to sign up but needed mobile phone number or credit card: 6 per cent
I’m not saying it’s simple but the fundamentals of email marketing shouldn’t be that difficult to get right. I’d suggest these three key steps retailers should take to improve their global email marketing strategies:
The three golden rules
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1. Engage: Customers are often most receptive to communication from brands after making an online purchase and engaging customers at this point is integral to any email marketing strategy. Relevant, personalised post-purchase emails that target the customer on an individual level are also critical in encouraging a second purchase whilst simultaneously reminding them of your brand and reinforcing the benefits.
2. Remind: Show lapsed customers why they signed up to receive your newsletter in the first place. What did you use in your original message and can you try to re-employ this tactic to encourage users to respond to your emails now? Overall, make sure your email marketing campaigns are based around users’ identified interests. If this doesn’t work then it might be worth removing these subscribers from your list. A drastic step, yes, but it’s better to have quality over quantity.
3. Reward: Identify frequent buyers and reward them with appropriate offers. You could set up a triggered loyalty scheme campaign where subscribers are rewarded with exclusive discounts, points for every £1 they spend or voucher codes if they spend a certain amount online within a set time.”
Regular email communication is intrinsic in engaging potential customers, rewarding loyalty and encouraging repeat purchases. The basics of email marketing aren’t as tricky as many people think, ESP’s are there to provide the tools and support for you to run your email marketing and as long as you keep the ‘three golden rules’ front of mind you’ll be on the way to email marketing success!
One of the contentions that surround email marketing at the moment is the issue of when you retire an email address. Leading up to Christmas, when the heat is on, ambitious sales targets tempt even cautious marketers to push out the boat and send to everyone. If an email list is causing deliverability issues, it is quite common for a bit of a clean up to be suggested. It’s not a “stab in the dark” strategy, because when used correctly it can lead to a net increase in response and revenue.
However, you cannot ignore, when retired email addresses are mailed, they often produce some revenue. This almost flies in the face of the no response/retirement strategy, but in reality, some fine tuning is in order to squeeze all the value from your list.
To deal with this issue properly, you will certainly need response (sales) data for your customers, and need to know which email addresses the data relates too. In most instances the full picture of your list can only be achieved through wider knowledge of the customer.
All too often, the most responsive customers are the ones who have been opening and clicking your emails recently. But it’s also important to segment those who are no longer interested, from those that have disengaged from your emails due to a higher contact frequency than their needs require.
The first stage of the solution should be test the differing frequency of those people who haven’t opened or clicked for a while. Although a 6 month open/click window might be fine for some businesses, it might not suit those businesses with a longer sales cycle or a wider range of buying frequency. In these instances, sending mailings for twelve months or even longer might be better, but proper testing should help you decide when a customer is signalling defection.
If you have transactional data, you can use the principles of RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary value) to build up a model which predicts your most responsive customers. In an ideal world you could marry up the purchase RFM data alongside the online engagement data, to see the point where Recency for online engagement (opens/clicks/visits) signals a lapsed customer.
Using email response data, we create two segments, those that are recently engaged, and those that are not (don’t throw any away yet!). The engaged segment can carry on receiving the main campaign emails at the normal frequency. The less engaged segment now gets a rest (for about three to four times the normal frequency of you campaign emails). So if you generally send weekly, rest this segment for a month.
What we are trying to do is identify a segment within the email database that has stopped responding to emails due to a mailing frequency that is too high for them. By responding to the users behaviour, you are able to make changes to the email frequency of this group.
If people from this lower frequency segment, respond, it is important that they don’t go straight back into the main campaign mailing frequency, but give them more of a rest between mailings.
What we are trying to do is to start down the road of mailing people at a frequency that suits them, keeping them engaged and encouraging them to buy more. Managing frequency is the easiest way to respond to behaviour (or lack of it) but if you have more resource, you could try content too. One of the other top reasons why people stop opening emails, is that the emails are no longer relevant to them. The difficultly with content relevance, is that it relies on a deeper customer knowledge, or web behaviour data.
Unfortunately there will be those email addresses in the list that despite your best efforts will never be responsive again. So, at some point you will have to bite the bullet and let these addressees go. It is important to accept that the damage that is done to the whole email programme (in the shape of poor inbox deliverability and reduction in response) will outweigh any extra revenue gained by mailing these inactive email addresses.
I grew up reading Dr. Seuss books and my favourite story happens to be “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” I’m not a huge fan of the Christmas season, and I suppose that part of me secretly sympathizes with the Grinch’s refusal to make merry. There’s something about the irreverence of his all-consuming glee as he snaps up presents, stockings and Christmas trees from each house in Whoville that I can’t help but enjoy. Horrible, I know, but that’s the truth of it.
Even though the Grinch’s antics never fail to amuse me, I’ve come to realize that some in the email marketing industry find a little too much similarity between the Grinch’s attempts to prevent every “Who in Whoville” from having a happy Christmas and the ISPs filtering of their legitimate, permission-based Christmas emails to their consumers and prospects. The fourth quarter of the year is often the most crucial for businesses, especially retailers, and the pain of being bulked and blocked is never felt more strongly than at this time of year.
Having your messages sent to the junk folder or blocked all together can certainly be enough to dampen anyone’s Christmas spirit, but the reasons behind these filtering decisions are actually related to marketers’ sending practices. While the Grinch’s issues with Christmas may be fairly complex (“It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small”), filtering at the ISP level all comes down to one primary factor: your sender reputation.
A high reputation ensures high inbox placement, while a low reputation means bulking and blocking. According to Return Path’s latest Sender Reputation Report, 77% of deliverability issues are caused by a poor sender reputation. So instead of blaming the ISPs, who are tasked with protecting their users from the massive amount of spam being sent year-round (95% of all email sent is spam), it’s time to focus on how your practices may be negatively affecting your sender reputation.
How can you ensure that ISPs view your emails as “nice” rather than “naughty?” By paying attention to the following six factors that impact sender reputation:
- Complaints: the result of subscribers clicking the “This is spam button” in their email client, which registers their complaint to the ISP.
- List Hygiene: related to how you are managing your data, and how clean it is. If it isn’t, you’ll see a higher percentage of spam traps and unknown users.
- Infrastructure: related to how your mail server is configured and whether or not your messages are authenticated with various protocols like SMTP, SenderID and DKIM.
- IP Permanence: whether or not you maintain consistent mailing volume over the same IP addresses. Spammers tend to “pop up” on an IP, blast their messages and then disappear.
- Message Quality: the content of your emails and whether or not you have links, images, text or code that triggers spam filters.
- Engagement: whether or not your subscribers are interacting with your messages, or just ignoring and deleting them.
Of these six factors, complaints and list hygiene weigh the most heavily on your sender reputation. For more information about keeping complaints to a minimum and ensuring your list is squeaky clean, check out my presentation from last week’s JUMP Conference.
So don’t blame the Grinch – or the ISPs – when you find your Christmas emails are being kept out of the inbox. All of the factors contributing to your sender reputation are within your control. However, you can’t fix what you don’t measure. Get started by finding out your sender reputation at this free resource: www.senderscore.org.
Needs you…
Regular readers will know that the DMA Client Email Marketing Survey is an initiative undertaken by the Email Marketing Council and, more specifically, the Email Benchmarking hub, to complement the National Email Benchmarking Report. The report provides email marketers with valuable research into the state of email, the latest challenges effecting the channel and perhaps more importantly insight into the opportunities of tomorrow. We are now collecting data for the 2011 survey and would really appreciate it if you could spend ten minutes completing the survey.
In return for taking part in this year’s survey you will receive a free copy of the report.
In my opinion, the 2010 report included a number of highlights:-
- Most marketers agreed that social media presented both an opportunity and threat to their email marketing activity
- 90% of marketers were planning to increase their spend on email marketing
- Concern over budget, resource and data integration were high and likely to have prohibit marketers from targeting, segmenting and integrating campaigns
- Competition in the inbox continued to hot up, with businesses sending more messages and social media messages increasingly taking up space in the inbox
I can’t wait to see what the 2011 report is going to tell us, so please take ten minutes to complete the survey and ensure you receive your free copy of the report.
The term spam trap gets used a lot in email marketing especially when talking about deliverability. They are difficult to spot, changing all the time and can seriously damage the reputation of the sender. Most large ISP’s and spam filtering companies use spam traps and the consequence of landing in the various traps differs. Landing in a single spam trap might not cause you too many problems but land in the same trap several times or land in multiple related spam traps and you could find yourself blacklisted. Rather than trying to spot them, the best approach is to try and avoid them altogether.
A spam trap is an email honeypot and in its simplest form this is an email address that is used to collect spam emails. Unlike a spam filter however, it doesn’t try to recognise what is spam and what isn’t, it just assumes that everything it receives is spam. It can do this because the email address is never used by a real human being and has never been subscribed to receive any email. Hence anything that gets sent to the address is unsolicited email.
You can create your own simple but crude spam trap very easily. Create an email address and publish it on your website in a way that is invisible to a normal user. An automated harvester will come and collect the email address and eventually over time you will start to receive unsolicited emails. Spam traps of this type are very successful in identifying lists that have been harvested from WHOIS records of domain names, websites and Newsgroups.
Another type of spam trap involves taking a once valid email address and after a period of time converting it to a trap. Many ISP’s such as Hotmail, Google and Yahoo adopt this approach with old and abandoned mailboxes that are no longer used. The addresses will normally be left dormant for a period. The exact length of time varies and is unclear but it is thought to be between 6 and 18 months. During this time the email address will normally return a bounce to indicate to non-spammers that the address is no longer in use. Hotmail might return an error such as “550 Requested action not taken: mailbox unavailable”.
Using list hygiene techniques the email address would be removed after a pre-defined number of bounces. Spammers generally won’t remove the email address from lists because of a bounce so when the address gets converted to an spam trap they will continue to use it.
So how do you know if you are sending email to spam traps? This is something you want to know before your reputation is damaged and you suffer from deliverability issues. If you are using an Email Service Provider then it is likely they will monitor this for you and let you know if a list you are using is causing problems. If you are sending your own emails then some ISP’s have services that can help. Microsoft has the Smart Network Data Services (SNDS). This service tells you how many spam traps each of your IP addresses have hit and the complaint rate.
If you are hitting a number of spam traps then how do you remove them and avoid it happening again? As you would expect, the people that operate the spam traps are obviously reluctant to tell you which email addresses are spam traps and there is no way to visually identify a spam trap as it looks like a normal email address. Microsoft say on the SNDS FAQ page “We recognize that providing the actual trap messages would be useful to legitimate businesses trying to clean lists or customers that are hitting these accounts, however this is another unfortunate case where the risk of the data being useful to spammers is too great.”.
The best way to avoid spam traps is good list hygiene and management. Always remove hard bounces after a number of failed delivery attempts and look at segmenting your data into engaged and non-engaged recipients. You should try and re-engage the users who aren’t opening or clicking on the links in your emails and if after a period, maybe 6 to 12 months, there is no activity then they should be removed from the list. If you do acquire new data then make sure you know the source of the data and don’t combine it with your existing lists until you are happy that the data is clean of spam traps.
On Thursday 6th October, the DMA hosts an event to mark the release of the DMA’s Email Tracking Study which asks consumers their views on the emails marketers are sending them and more. It is an invaluable insight into the state of the email marketing channel and let me tell you, the results this year are both surprising and insightful.
One of the details that came out of the study was that there is an inner circle or Email VIP list that consumers have when it comes to marketing emails. You can find out more about how to get into this inner circle from Dela Quist at Alchemy Worx and hear about all the rest of the findings from the study from Paul Seabrook, director at fast.MAP.
Still maintaining the theme of the inner circle, the final session focuses on how Ticketmaster used email to enter the inner circle and establish itself as the market leader in online ticket purchasing.
You can find out more about the event on the DMA’s website by clicking here.
Looking forward to seeing you there.
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