Adestra

Just over half of emarketers in the UK (57%) admit to cleansing their databases regularly – finds the largest survey ever undertaken of email marketers from Adestra and E-consultancy.* Small wonder most companies have problems with email effectiveness and deliverability.

*source: The E-Consultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census 2008, published March 2008, surveyed over 600 in-house and agency respondents across different industry sectors.

The new findings show deliverability is a major problem with more than half having trouble getting into recipients’ inboxes and over two thirds of companies are not using email effectively. The key reasons behind this are cited as lack of budget and poor quality of data. Targeting contacts with relevant messages from an accurate database is fundamental. Without clean, complete and accurate data, messages can never be relevant and targeted despite one’s best intentions.

Paul Crabtree, Marketing Director at Adestra, says: “The research highlights the importance of good data in email marketing – without this foundation your strategy is dead in the water, no matter how good the design and content are. To move your ROI from email to 5x start by investing in cleansing your databases and linking them together.”

To ensure the databases are updated automatically and capture data obtained from multi-channel routes, the systems must be integrated – yet more than 8 in 10 have ‘no integration’ or ‘some’. Having systems that don’t talk to each other not only prevents the effective measurement of ROI, but fundamentally hampers effective marketing overall – particularly in a multi-channel scenario. There appears to be a huge spread of email marketing effectiveness – 49% of company email marketers say that their ROI is up to 2x, while 24% are achieving 5x or more – and the use of integrated systems and good data plays a significant part in this.

Disappointingly, this lack of confidence in the accuracy of their data, due to a lack of ‘joined up thinking’, means many marketers are reluctant to deploy seemingly simple, tactical campaign improvements such as personalisation, segmentation and testing programs. In addition, failure to encourage customers while they are in buying mode – 2 in 3 emarketers admit to not emailing abandoned baskets – is a major lost revenue opportunity. “On the simplest tactical level, not getting your house in order prevents marketers from implementing small improvements which are proven to deliver better ROI. Put simply, email marketers are forced to ‘spray and pray’ if they are not confident in the accuracy of their data,” adds Paul.

Marketers looking to use email marketing as part of their marketing mix need to invest in integrating their systems and building their database of contacts. Without legal, efficient and accurate data collection methods marketers will be unable to properly use the email channel in their programs.

Often, the outsourced email marketing tool is bolted on to existing processes and builds up a database of information including preference information, behavioural information and more. Most email companies can now integrate this information with marketer’s own web sites and databases as standard. Others work with companies, such as Data Salon or Wyvern, who provide database products that can consume data from numerous different sources in an organisation, de-dupe contacts and match them to campaigns to provide measurement and ROI tracking.

Work with your ESP (and database aggregators) to improve your database in following ways: 1. Implement a regular cleansing program 2. Invest in integrating key systems across your organisation 3. Always use confirmed double opt-in 4. Survey your contacts to learn more about them in order to improve your segmentation and behavioural targeting 5. Invest in email validation to ensure the make up of domains is correct 6. Don’t do all the work yourself – encourage contacts to use ‘update your details’ forms 7. Always record the original source of the data

*The full E-consultancy report is available now from www.adestra.com/census

Paul Crabtree, Marketing Director

60% say they don’t need to improve, yet 80% can’t measure how much they are losing through poor deliverability

The largest survey of email marketers in the UK, The E-consultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census March 2008, shows deliverability is a major problem with more than half having trouble getting into recipients’ inboxes AND 80% having no idea how much sales revenue they are losing through poor deliverability. Of those that could measure it, email marketers estimated they were losing 11% of their budget and agencies put this figure higher at 14%.

Paul Crabtree, Marketing Director at Adestra, says: “By fixing deliverability UK email marketers could boost their sales revenue by at least 11% – for UK businesses that equates to over £550million.”

60% of emarketers say they don’t need to improve deliverability, yet 80% cannot measure how much they are losing through poor deliverability. Ensuring emails are delivered into inboxes is such a fundamental objective, yet it is their lowest priority – it appears emarketers would rather be doing more appealing things like behavioural targeting, dynamic content and strategy.

“Deliverability is being largely underestimated by marketers – but it is absolutely critical. The bottom line is deliverability equals sales revenue–a one per cent improvement, or even less, will boost revenues significantly. If email marketers don’t get this fundamental process right there is no point spending any more of their budget on email marketing–they may as well flush it away,” adds Paul.

With the value of sales generated by direct marketing running at £125billion, and of this total online sales via the internet reaching £52billion (source: DMA Economic Impact Analysis 2006), Adestra estimates email marketing to generate around 10%, or £5billion worth, of sales.

Emarketers need to be tracking, and staying on top of, deliverability on an ongoing basis as it can fluctuate up and down. It is not a ‘one-off fix’ – improving deliverability in the short term does not mean it is permanently improved. Best practice methods need to be implemented.

How to improve deliverability

There are a number of proven methods to improve that all-important deliverability rate. Applying a series of data management and technical ‘standards’ can make a significant difference in a matter of days.

Work with an ESP that has the tools to identify and suppress previous bounce backs
Implement good deliverability policies including:

1. Technical: implement authentication and certification schemes.

2. Data: suppress hard bounces and ‘report as spam’ requests from ISPs

3. Pre-send testing: Check your message content via spam tools pre-send

4. Monitoring: tracking deliverability rates to identify and remedy problems

5. Invest in data cleaning campaigns and ensure accuracy in your database

The report also highlights the fact that a worryingly high number of marketers are not getting the basics right – a quality database, relevant content, good deliverability and follow-up trigger mechanisms are all essential for email effectiveness.

*The full E-consultancy report is available now from www.adestra.com/census