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.

On Tuesday I attended the DMA’s latest Email Customer Lifecycle Series event focused on helping email marketers drive conversions, one of the most important metrics and the primary goal for many marketers using the email channel. Sponsored by Silverpop, the theme for the event was clearly one of encouraging marketers to take their email programs to new heights by optimizing various conversion tactics and best practices. This was reinforced by Silverpop’s featured prize draw: an opportunity for attendees to win a helicopter ride for two over London!

Chair of the Email Marketing Council Richard Gibson got things started and introduced the audience to the great speakers on offer. They included Riaz Kanani from AlchemyWorx; Tim Watson from Emailvision; Larah Van Niekerk from eCircle; and Simone Vincent from MyVoucherCodes.

• Riaz’s key note presentation reviewed some upcoming conversion trends for 2011, including a focus on attribution and email’s ability to keep a marketer’s brand top-of-mind far beyond the initial send date. He stressed how important it is for marketers to be able to tie their email campaigns to conversions and sales in other channels, and to harness the power of triggered messages to help drive purchases. He also touched on the growth of mobile email and its potential to affect conversion rates. Riaz recommended various optimization tactics, including analyzing your list to track mobile email usage; designing with both the mobile and desktop experience in mind; and ensuring that landing pages are optimized for mobile environments.
• Next, Tim shared some tips and tricks for optimizing testing strategies to boost conversion rates. He provided the audience with a five-step process for creating a testing plan, including how to define your objectives and optimization metrics; create a test hypotheses; develop and define test cells; execute results; and analyze reports. He stressed the importance of testing against your marketing objectives and shared some great examples of split-tested subject lines and creative templates. He encouraged the audience to take a holistic approach to testing to ensure that increased performance metrics don’t negatively impact unsubscribe rates or complaints.

The audience then broke into two groups for presentations of case studies:

• Simone gave a fantastic overview of the strategy she put into place at MyVoucherCodes to increase conversions by boosting the subscriber activation rate, improving user engagement and decreasing list churn. She shared some impressive data points, including the use of a reminder series to encourage subscribers to complete their account activation as part of sign-up that resulted in 85% of subscribers now completing the MyVoucherCodes activation process. She also described the discounted alerts program that was put into place to target subscribers with relevant and timely offers based on their brand, product and key word preferences. These triggered messages, while complicated to implement, produced a 200% increase in click-through rates when compared to generic promotional mailings, and deliver consistently high open rates of 47% and click-through rates of 26%.
• Larah shared some great results that Center Parcs has recently had with their email program, including the introduction of a three-message “welcome home” series that increased rebooking rates by 10% and generates over £1M in revenue. The series includes an offer for rebooking sent when the subscriber returns from their Center Parcs holiday; a survey with a prize draw incentive; and a follow-up reminder email to respond. Other tactics for increasing conversions include village-specific email templates that are personalized based on where the subscriber is staying and the unique village experience they will have on their holiday.

The morning’s agenda wrapped up with a panel session featuring all of the speakers and an open request to take audience questions. The panellists tackled various challenges including:

• How to message to an eight-year-old list of email subscribers who had never been mailed to before (check the law; send in small batches; monitor spam trap hits; and consider focusing only on current/active customers);
• The most important tactics for email marketers to act on immediately (map out your customer lifecycle; implement testing; audit your entire program to identify strategies that will have a big impact, but will also be easy to execute on; and focus on creating relevancy)
• Email marketing trends with longevity (social media and email integration; the importance of subscriber-level and behavioural data; and mobile email optimization).

Would you like to attend one of these free breakfast briefings? The next event in the series will focus on optimizing your engagement and retention efforts. The DMA regularly updates their Email Marketing event listings here, so watch this space.

Greetings and welcome to September’s Infobox. In this back-to-school issue, we give you the lowdown on the latest research into consumers’ tolerance of frequent marketing emails; whether or not personalisation of the subject line speaks to recipients; the benefits of going beyond best practice and the influence of ISPs on deliverability; and for our members we provide a comprehensive checklist for creating the complete ‘welcome’ email.

Infobox event

As we step out of the summer holidays and into the autumn term, there is an upcoming programme of email-themed knowledge-sharing events. Most notably, our first B2B conference will be held on 1 October. Joel Harrison, editor of B2B Marketing magazine, will chair the event, which will feature speakers from Silverpop, Return Path, Osborn Clark, Newsweaver, Alchemy Worx, eInsight, Tamara Gielen Consulting, and more.

Ready Steady Email!, one of the DMA’s most popular half day workshops, is back on 5 October. Focusing on insight into how to create the perfect email marketing campaign, this workshop is a must for those wanting to carve out a solid career in the digital marketing sector.

Articles this month:

How often can you send to your email base before they unsubscribe or disengage? Andrew Robinson, Lyris

What’s my name? Kirsty Montgomery, e-Dialog

ISPs, best practice and why it matters Richard Gibson, Return Path

Campaigns we like: Chiconomise Guy Hanson, The Database Group

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