Adestra

Yes and Yes…

These are the golden rules – segment, target and test – absolutely fundamental to your ongoing email marketing, I can’t stress the importance of these enough. Unfortunately, so many emarketers blindly send emails to their database without any segmentation.

Even a simple male/female split will improve relevancy, boost click-throughs and can turn an average campaign into a great one. For example, Clothing at Tescos doubled their click-throughs using dynamic content for a gender spilt – so females received bikini messaging and men trunks.

Testing what works best is absolutely critical. Similarly test timing – there is no default best time-of-day or day-of-week to send, it varies considerably between company sectors, and audience. To get the best results you need to get the email into the inbox of the recipient at the time that is right for them.

If you know your audience is likely to work standard business hours, but you collect personal email addresses, then sending Monday morning probably isn’t going to attract the best possible response.”

Rob Hunter, Client Strategy Consultant

The E-Consultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census 2008 not only shows that over two thirds of companies aren’t using email effectively, but the majority are not getting the most from their ESPs.

ROI tracking

Further Census findings showed that although budgets are increasing, a worrying trend is the continual lack of ROI measurement – 43% of emarketers still don’t track it. Without accurate tracking, testing programs cannot be measured.

The process of tracking ROI can be more achievable than you may think: simply ask them; use Priority Codes to label orders; check for buyers on your email database; Mirror Pages; Page Tagging; Web analytics; and Integrated Databases.

Abandon basket campaigns

Indium Web Management recently helped an online gift retailer to maximise sales through conversion tracking and the process of remarketing – one of the most powerful uses of email marketing.

Having captured people who abandoned their baskets over a 3-day period using Adestra’s MessageFocus ASP tool, the data analytics element of the system then identified the webpages each customer viewed and who had abandoned their baskets. The remarketing process then began by emailing customers to remind them about their abandoned items. In order to differentiate this communication from previous htmls, Adestra designed an email resembling a formal customer care letter, addressed to “Dear Mr…”, sending it from a real person. The campaign results were impressive, increasing their conversion rate by 35 times.

Deliverability

Email delivery is still a major problem, the Census shows over half of emarketers have trouble getting into recipients’ inboxes AND 80% have no idea how much sales revenue they are losing through poor deliverability. Don’t underestimate the power of improving deliverability – just a 1% improvement can have a massive effect on revenue and turn your campaign effectiveness from ‘average’ to ‘excellent’. Work with your ESP on this – it warrants a whole article by itself!

In Summary

Keep it short, make your offers stand out, always have a call to action and make it personal. Don’t forget that you know your audience better than anyone else, and clever copy will never support a poor, badly targeted offer. Finally, keep testing; it’s the best way to find out what your customers want!

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant

I’ve spent the day judging the Customer Direct Awards 2008 for the Periodical Publishers Association (PPA’s):

http://www.customerdirect08.co.uk/Awards.aspx

I’ve particularly enjoyed reviewing the entries for “Best use of interactive media – best email campaign” and “Best use of interactive media – best online campaign”.

What has struck me though is how entrants have been using the email marketing channel.  There are some simple lessons for every publisher:

1. Test: before you roll out large campaigns: test subject lines, lay outs, position of imagery as well as traditional tests including data and offer.  They do affect campaign performance.
2. Testing is a ongoing process: learn with each email.  Your improvements will build significantly over time.
3. Data is at the heart: capturing email addresses and enriching their contact details with additional information over time is essential to building a segmentation strategy.  Don’t just capture email addresses and leave them but develop a communication strategy to build up additional information about them.
4. Don’t just rely on load and blast: consider following up email newsletters with triggered campaigns based on their response.
5. Multi-channel: email is not a stand alone medium.  Use it to push people to call centres (with up sell strategies) and into news stands.  Don’t forget to use it after people contact your call centre or redeem a voucher too.
6. ROI analysis: There are costs with every send whether it be lost opportunities to contact people when they unsubscribe, the cost of campaign production or the opportunity cost of your time.  Every campaign should be viewed on it’s own merit taking full consideration of the costs.

Award winning email campaigns are based on sound direct marketing principles.  I’ve been pleased to see almost every entry measured ROI analysis and included sound testing strategies.  They’ve achieved some fantastic results and it just goes to show how imbedded email marketing is within the publishing industry.  However, with testing plans, the embryonic improvements many marketing teams are experiencing are just the tip of the iceberg.

Paul Crabtree, Sales and Marketing Director

How to improve low read rates and click throughs

When an email is delivered, recipients need to be encouraged to open it. Remember, transactional emails such as order confirmations and password reminders always have the highest open rates, as do those forwarded by friends or colleagues.

Industry research shows that from name and subject line play an important part in any successful email marketing campaign, as do previous history and recognising sender details. So make sure that any email you send out is worth reading! Ensure the subject line, call to action and website landing page are consistent and messaging follows through.

‘From’ Name

This is one of the first things an email recipient will look at and therefore should be recognisable.
Consider using: your brand; your product; your company; a person’s name – this may seem more personable, however you want your email to strengthen your brand name and outlive personnel changes.

Subject Line

The recipient needs to glance at your subject line and want to open your email. Successful subject lines clearly and concisely explain what the email is all about, grab attention and may include an urgent deadline: “HURRY – 20% OFF ends 8th January…”  or  “Research Request: Email Marketing Census” .  JupiterResearch found that 35 percent of email subscribers open messages because of what’s contained in the subject line. Subject line length is also important. Research from Return Path showed that click-through rates for subject lines with 49 or fewer characters were 75 percent higher than for those with 50 or more.

Personalisation

Personalising your emails is extremely important because it builds familiarity and trust between you and your recipients encouraging opens and clicks – if you have captured the data make sure you use it. Personalise the subject line, the opening sentence, and within the main body.

Call to Action

What do you want your recipients to do? Spell it out – they won’t read your email in its entirety so make sure your call to action can be picked out as they scan the email. This should ideally appear twice in an email, at least once above the fold. Use text and images, with text preferably close to an image as readers’ eyes are drawn to images. But remember the images might not be enabled – most email clients don’t have images displayed by default.

Segment, target and test

Many emarketers [worryingly] blindly send emails to their database without any segmentation, whereas even a simple male/female split will improve relevancy.  For example, Clothing at Tescos doubled their click-throughs using dynamic content for a gender spilt – so females received bikini messaging and men trunks. Testing what works best is absolutely critical. Similarly test timing – there is no default best time to send, it varies considerably between company sectors, and audience. If you’re trying to target builders in the daytime hours – they’re most likely working on site.

Links

Make links obvious – they are critical to your click-throughs. Even if your call to action is fantastic, they can’t click on a link they can’t see. Blue and underlined text is established as the link symbol, for example, one major consumer exhibition found 63% of recipients clicked on blue text links within the body of an image–based email, rather than the images themselves. However, it’s also good practice to link all images by default.

User behaviour

Use ESP tools to monitor how people behave – which links do they click on in the email and then how they navigate your website. Use simple split-testing on your website to gauge the best response – eg an A/B split will give one set of images/text for a first time user, and the second time they visit a different set of images/text.

Understand the jargon

Set clear objectives and measure against the right variable – either open rates, click-throughs, or conversion.  Sometimes open rates may be low, but conversion rates high – equally a small improvement in open rates can improve conversion rates and thus ROI significantly.

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant

When an email is delivered, recipients need to be encouraged to open it. Remember, transactional emails such as order confirmations and password reminders always have the highest open rates, as do those forwarded by friends or colleagues.

For your successful email marketing campaign, it is essential to plan subject line. Industry research shows that both play an important part, although it is important not to look at each communication in isolation but instead as part of an ongoing dialog- previous history and recognising sender details play a very important factor. So make sure that any email you send out is worth reading!”

Top 3 factors influencing recipients to open emails

1. Know and trust the sender

2. Compelling subject line

3. Previously opened and thought valuable

(source: Return Path)

Reena Mistry, Client Strategy Consultant

There are many theories regarding the best days and times to send your email campaigns.  In truth there is no ‘right answer’ but some simple considerations could improve the open, click and all important conversion rate of your broadcasts.

1.        Test and monitor.  Varying send times or split testing your email Campaigns, sending at different times or days will give you the initial insight to the ‘best’ times.  Monitor peaks, especially activity away from the initial send, when interrogating the results from your ESP.

2.        Follow them around.  Rather than reacting to email activity, speak with your web team to find out when the website is most active away from your scheduled email marketing / newsletter send times.

3.        Consider the goals of campaign and ensure you are gauging success on the correct variable.  If the campaign requires a form complete sign-up then consider the volume of completed forms and not perhaps the open or click rate.  The open or click rate could be high early on a Monday morning but the conversion rate of the form sign-up maybe low as a busy time in the working day.

Test again!

Reena Mistry, Client Strategy Consultant