Adestra

As the grim reality of a recession is upon us, organisations are being forced to streamline their operations and cut costs, while at the same time maintain performance and managements’ growth expectations. Although, all divisions are expected to pull their weight, only one division is more ‘customer facing’ and more exposed than others – The Marketing Department.  Marketers now find themselves on the frontline; with their budgets cut they have no choice but to rethink how they previously engaged their target audiences.

Without thinking about the possible pitfalls, in a recession marketers may be tempted to boost their results and profits in the short term by sending more email, buying more email addresses and following aggressive list growth strategies. However, this may result in a backlash from subscribers due to a lack of relevance and not conforming to expectations, thus ending with high SPAM complaints and list fatigue. In the long run, this exercise will have an adverse effect on credibility and deliverability reputation.

The latest DMA Email Benchmarking Report Q2 2008 shows that the majority of marketers state that the main barriers to creating more targeted mailings are ‘Resource & Time’ (58%) and ‘Insufficient Actionable Data (14%). This is a common misconception because nowadays most ESP’s offer marketers an abundant amount of campaign statistics that can be used to target subscribers based on their location on the customer lifecycle.

With the use of a little ‘Strategic Planning’ and by using ‘Standard Reporting Metrics’, marketers should be able to concentrate on those ‘Cash Cow’ subscribers that contribute the most to online revenues. This can be achieved by;

• Losing Some Dead Weight

Recoup some extra budget by sending a reactivation campaign to those subscribers that have not opened or clicked on your emails over a period of time, i.e. 6 – 8 months. Give them the option to update their preferences, so that you can tailor future communications more effectively. Those subscribers that still do not react to this campaign I would suggest removing them from your core list.

• Influencing a first-time purchase

By sending an enticing message to those subscribers that have opened but not-clicked, clicked but not purchased, added to basket but not purchased – send a compelling offer/incentive to buy now.

• Promoting a Repeat Purchase

Use conversion tracking to enable cross-sell and up-sell opportunities based on purchase activity and behavior. Alert customers to new offers and product releases from similar product lines as previously purchased items.

• Increasing Customer Retention

By sending personalised ‘We Miss You’ messages to customers that haven’t purchased or reached the later stages of the customer lifecycle after a certain period of time, lets them know that you care! Offer a credible motive for a subscriber to come back to your site by engaging their interest with new products and VIP offers.

To be successful and maintain momentum in today’s market, marketers need to respond accordingly to subscribers’ behavioral actions, be as relevant as possible and ensure that it is their brand that the subscriber recognizes and remembers when the need arises. Loyalty is king…..

Daniel Murphy, Commercial Account Manager.

In the current financial climate it’s no surprise that clients are asking me how they can extract extra value from their online marketing activity. “I want to generate extra sales/bookings/visitors but I don’t have the resource available right now to put together additional content. How can I squeeze extra value out of what I have already?”

This need not be as difficult as it might sound!

With email marketing you have access to information that is all too often overlooked – visibility of how recipients interact with your communications. Of course, we all use open and click information to generate stats but do you know you can drill down to see which individuals clicked and which didn’t?
Might not sound that interesting but consider the opportunities to:

• Resend to non-openers, perhaps with a different subject line, or at a different time
• Resend to those that open but don’t click, perhaps with revised content
• Resend to those that click but don’t convert. Maybe with a greater incentive or offer

All of the above and more is possible using MessageFocus – now, using the new filter tool, available within your MessageFocus account. The filter tool can be used to segment a list by pretty much any combination you can think of using data in your list and interaction with previous email campaigns.

Speak to your Strategy Consultant or Account Manager to discuss how filters can help you improve your campaign performance.

Rob Hunter, Client Strategy Consultant

More and more people are hitting the ‘report as spam’ button in webmail email clients as a alternative to clicking on the unsubscribe link in the email and the reasons for this are pretty simple:

1. Laziness – scrolling down to the bottom of your email to find your unsubscribe link can just be too much for some people and with the glaring ‘report as spam’ button, this can be the easier option.
2. Lack of trust – will the unsubscribe be a simple process or will they have to remember the login from 10 years ago. Or will the request to unsubscribe be honoured?
3. Ignorance – some people simply click the ‘report as spam’ button without actually knowing what it does.

So, how can you stop this from happening?

Traditionally, you will see the unsubscribe link at the bottom of an email, sometimes hidden in the small print and sometimes as a little link. Yes, most people will go to the bottom of the email to find the link but with the prominence of ‘report as spam’ it might be time to move break form and have an unsubscribe link at the top of your email and at the bottom.

As scary as this may seem, think about what you are saying when you do this?

1. By making it easier to unsubscribe, you’re saying that you are confident that your email is relevant to them.
2. You’re making it easier for them to choose ‘unsubscribe’ rather than report you as spam with a prominent, visible unsubscribe link. Reporting as spam means that you may not be able to deliver to that domain ever again (much worse someone opting out of your email campaigns).
3. By having two unsub links, you’re covering all bases so people who want to go to the bottom will find what they are looking for.

Of course, the best way to reduce spam reports is to send relevant email that people want to stay subscribed to, but moving the unsubscribe link is worth a try too.

Reena Mistry
Client Strategy Consultant