Adestra

The third annual Email Marketing Census, published in association with Adestra and Econsultancy, is a crucial benchmarking tool for marketers, and is based on the findings of a survey of more than 1,000 email marketers and supplier respondents, such as those working for agencies and email service providers.

Key findings include:

• More than three quarters of respondents (78%) now rate email as ‘excellent’ or ‘good’for return on investment (ROI), higher than any other digital marketing channel and up 12% since a year ago.

• Significant numbers of marketers are still failing to adopt a range of best practices relating to email, and many are still failing to get to grips with deliverability. Less than a fifth of companies (18%) know what percentage of the email budget is lost through non-delivery.

• Lack of strategy is now more likely to be regarded by company respondents as a significant barrier to effective email marketing, up from 32% of email marketers in 2008 to 44% in 2009.

Topics covered in the third annual Email Census include:

• Approach to email (i.e. in-house, managed service, hosted etc)

• Use of services provided by email service providers

• Type of audiences targeted by email marketers

• Extent of email marketing (number of emails sent)

• Email marketing budget

• Return on investment from email marketing

• Effectiveness of email marketing practices

• Barriers to successful email marketing

• Deliverability

• Integration of email with digital marketing activities

• Resourcing

• Email marketing focus

For a copy of the Email Marketing Census, please see the Adestra team on Stand E5072 or click here.

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant

Despite the economic climate, Adestra, one of UK’s leading email marketing service providers, reveals continued growth, as it announces a 5% increase in its client base from the beginning of the year.

Companies across all sectors are turning to Adestra’s comprehensive and strategic email marketing services, as a growing number of marketers take advantage of the  excellent return on investment (ROI). In particular, Adestra has seen growth in media, on-line services, industry associations and retail sectors, with new clients including Newsquest, GMTV, Heals, The Royal Academy of Arts and The Royal Institute of British Architects.

Henry Hyder-Smith, Managing Director at Adestra, comments: “We are delighted with our continued growth and to be working alongside such high-caliber brands. Adestra offers the best combination of email technology and marketing expertise by providing high quality and targeted campaigns to deliver unrivalled ROI. As a result, we are in a great position to capitalize on the increased email marketing investments, as the sector continues to grow, replacing less cost effective marketing mediums.”

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant

The Institute of Direct Marketing has appointed a new Chair for its IDM Digital Council. Steve Kemish F IDM, Strategy & Services Director at email marketing agency, Adestra, takes on the Council Chairmanship with immediate effect, and one of his first engagements will be to speak for the IDM Academy at Internet World on 29 April.

The IDM Digital Council is a body of senior digital marketing practitioners who draw on their collective experience to help steer the IDM’s professional services in the delivery of the highest quality qualifications and training in digital marketing. The Council aims to assist the IDM in the promotion of digital marketing excellence and to help in the education of undergraduates by acting as a bridge between Academia and the marketing profession.

IDM Managing Director, Derek Holder comments:

“We’re delighted that Steve has accepted the role of IDM Digital Council Chair. He has extensive, wide-ranging experience, outstanding strategic and personal skills and a deep-seated passion and enthusiasm to realise the potential of digital marketing. The perfect combination of qualities to ensure that the Council achieves its mission of helping the IDM deliver the most comprehensive, up-to-date and relevant teaching.”

Steve Kemish has over 10 years of digital marketing experience and has been a tutor for the IDM’s respected Certificate in B2B Marketing and Certificate in Digital Marketing for the last five. His session at the IDM Internet World Academy, Profiting from email marketing in an economic downturn, is one of 11 free, practical half-hour sessions, all tasters from full-length IDM one- and two-day courses and delivered at the exhibition by expert, practising B2B marketers.

About Steve Kemish

Steve Kemish F IDM, Client Strategy & Services Director at Adestra has over ten years of experience in digital marketing, both client-side and agency. He and his team work with clients to help them realise the potential of digital marketing and to help deliver results.

Passionate about using marketing principles to get the most out of the technology, when not with clients he is to be found speaking on the subject throughout the world on behalf of Adestra and the Institute of Direct Marketing (IDM), for whom he has lectured since 2004. Steve has worked with many brands on digital marketing, including: npower, Skype, ITV, Help the Aged, Oracle, Cisco & British Airways.

About the IDM Digital Council

The IDM Digital Marketing Council comprises senior digital marketing practitioners from client and agencies who meet regularly to share views and experiences on the latest trends and challenges surrounding digital marketing. The primary objective of the council is to assist with ongoing development of the IDM’s training portfolio thereby ensuring delivery of the most comprehensive, up-to-date and relevant teaching in digital marketing.

Aside from Council Chair, Steve Kemish F IDM, other Digital Council members are:

Jonathan Bass, Managing Director, Incentivated Ltd
Julian Brewer, Head of Online Marketing and Content, Barclays Bank
Nick Broomfield, Senior Global Digital Marketing Manager, Diageo
Ewan Carpenter, Global Digital Marketing Director, Future Group, Glaxo SmithKline
Nick Emmel, Planning Director, Dare Digital
Tim Faircliff, General Manager, Consumer Media UK & EMEA,
Danny Meadows-Klue, Chief Executive, IAB
Julia Paviour, Online Business Performance Manager, British Airways Holidays
Damon Reynolds, Consultant, Pink & Fluffy
Dan Rosen, Head of AKQA Mobile, AKQA
Gavin Sinden, Digital Strategy Director, Equi=Media
Roger Sniezek, Digital Director, Nectar
David Walmsley, Head of Webselling, John Lewis Direct
Louise White, Group Marketing Director, Incisive Media

Find out more at www.theidm.com/digitalcouncil

As the economic downturn bites, organisations need to ensure every pound spent on marketing is being maximised and consequently the email marketing industry is experiencing steady growth. We are helping clients through this challenging sales period and have recruited key staff to cope with the upsurge.

The three new appointments are all skilled digital marketers each with specific email experience – key skills and abilities to help Adestra clients succeed, especially in a tough environment.

Emma Mumby joins from Emailcenter, Andrew Rooks joins from Communicator Corp and Julia Hilfrich joins from Premiere Global Services.

Henry Hyder-Smith, MD says: “With many companies looking for efficient sales and marketing channels in the downturn, inevitably they focus on email marketing as an effective and measurable medium. In short, it’s proven to work. We’ve recruited extra experienced staff to work with clients through this difficult period. We welcome Emma, Andrew and Julia to the team to help us build on our previous success.”

Emma Mumby - Emma joins Adestra in her new role as Sales Manager New Business, targeting clients within the B2B, B2C and B2E markets. As well as client sales activity, she is responsible for educating clients about the value and many benefits of email marketing during this tough economic climate. Previously, Emma worked in sales for Emailcenter and before that in Telcos and Utilities for seven years as a Business Development Manager and latterly managing a team of eight.

“I’m really excited about working for Adestra and although very early days, the company’s approach to new business and client care is one of the key drivers behind the rapid growth it has experienced over the past four years as well as the reputation it enjoys in the industry amongst other email marketing professionals,”

Julia Hilfrich - Julia is Adestra’s new Senior Commercial Account Manager responsible for developing existing business/major clients. She has almost four years’ experience in digital marketing and a diploma/masters degree in Business Economics and International Marketing. With German her native tongue, Julia adds an international flavour to the company. Previously she worked in email marketing for Premiere Global Services.

Andrew Rooks - As Sales Manager, Andrew’s responsibilities include sourcing, acquiring and developing long term business relationships with blue-chip clients across all industry verticals. He joins with three years’ email marketing experience, having previously worked for Communicator Corp in a similar sales role. Keen to create and prove the direct sales channel, Andrew has developed working partnerships with a number of major international companies.

The latest report from E-consultancy shows that 7 in 10 companies use email marketing as the most powerful way to engage with their customers.

The E-consultancy/cScape Online Customer Engagement Survey Report 2008 found that the overwhelming majority of companies surveyed (69%) agree that email newsletters have resulted in a tangible improvement in customer engagement.

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant at Adestra says: “Despite the growth of social media networks, blogging, video, microsites etc – this report clearly shows the best way to really engage with your customers is via email marketing. Timely, relevant and targeted newsletters help build long term loyalty as part of your online strategy.”

The future of email looks promising too: in terms of spending over the next 12 months, the report found there will be most investment in email newsletters, with 59% of respondents saying that their organisations will increase their spending in this area.

Linus Gregoriadis, Head of Research, E-consultancy adds: “Done properly, email marketing is a proven way of boosting customer loyalty and getting a tangible return on investment. Our research shows that email newsletters stand head and shoulders above other tactics as the most effective and tangible way of driving online engagement.”

The success of email marketing as a customer engagement tool is due to a number of key reasons: email is a personal medium and once customers have opted in they are interested in receiving material from your company; it is ideal in a multi-channel scenario working alongside direct mail, call centre and website strategies; and it allows techniques such as behavioural targeting to be used that improve relevancy. In addition, using accurate tracking means the established metrics such as open rates and click-throughs enable marketers to demonstrate the effectiveness, and even ROI, of each campaign.

However it must be remembered that 43% of marketers cannot track the ROI from their email marketing – according to E-Consultancy/Adestra Email Marketing Industry Census 2008. Without accurate tracking, testing programs cannot be measured. Without measurement, improving your email marketing will always be slow progress.

Top 10 tips for effective email newsletters:
1. Segment, target and test – the golden rules
2. When to send – test different times of the week and follow-up non-opens/non-clicks/abandoned baskets
3. Implement ROI tracking – it may be simpler than you imagined!
4. Before sending – select relevant and informative subject line
5. Make call to action clear
6. Content – place key messages above the fold, not image heavy, keep it simple
7. Focus on each step: deliverability, opens, click-throughs and conversions
8. Data hygiene – it’s extremely important, keep it updated regularly
9. Set clear objectives for each campaign
10. Monitor user behaviour – even simple split tests can boost response

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

 Leading email marketing agency Adestra announces further appointments to its market-leading Client Strategy team. Two marketing specialists have been added to strengthen the team providing an unrivalled pool of knowledge for their digital marketing clients to tap into. 

Steve Kemish, Client Services Director says:  “No other ESP can provide the level of expertise and advice for emarketers – we’ve invested in attracting the right experts to help clients strategically improve their email marketing for the long term. It goes way beyond day-to-day advice and improving effectiveness/ROI for each campaign, and can include enhancing online brand perception, systems interoperability, linking with websites, and refining the process in a multi-channel environment.” 

“We’re delighted to have Rob and Reena onboard, who bring significant marketing experience to the team, both client-side and agency.”

 Rob Hunter, appointed as Client Strategy Consultant, has a background in online marketing and website analysis for RM. He has significant online marketing experience including management of email marketing, search engine marketing, online advertising, web analytics and website usability. Rob has also worked in project management positions and has experience working on key cross-divisional projects to generate offline sales leads from online activity. Rob has a wide range of hands-on skills to help clients get the best possible value and ROI from their online marketing.

 
Reena Mistry also joins Adestra as a Client Strategy Consultant with over four years’ direct marketing experience, both off and online. Most recently working as Account Manager at a leading digital agency for one of the UK’s largest mobile phone networks, she was tasked with helping to deliver optimum ROI on email campaigns – and she now aids Adestra’s clients to achieve the same. Whilst working client-side, she has developed and managed email and direct marketing programmes and was part of the team that won a coveted Revolution Magazine Digital Marketing Award.

Adestra, one of the leading Email marketing agencies, has appointed Steve Kemish in the position of Client Services Director. The new role is to head up the crucial Client Services function within Adestra that sets it apart from other Email Service Providers [ESPs].

Steve’s main responsibilities cover customer service, consultancy, strategy and
training. And his key objectives are to ensure that all of these teams deliver world-class customer service and act as an intelligence overlay to the technology of Adestra’s Message Focus email marketing system. The carefully chosen team of people understands what Adestra’s clients are trying to achieve and how best to help them realise these goals.

“The Client Services function is vitally important – as this will deliver what our clients really need – a team of people dedicated to helping them achieve better results with their digital direct marketing, and to act as an extension of their marketing team,” explains Steve.

Henry Hyder-Smith, MD at Adestra adds: “We’re delighted to have Steve onboard, heading up this exciting area. Clients are increasingly tapping into Adestra’s pool of email marketing expertise for both tactical and strategic help and advice – everything from conversion tracking and behavioural targeting, through to boosting ROI and improving brand positioning.”

Previously running his own consultancy, Steve has over nine years’ experience in Digital Marketing. He has an extensive working knowledge of all principles of online customer interaction and communication and has managed e-marketing strategy, development and deployment across many markets.

A regular industry speaker and trainer, Steve works with Adestra’s clients on email and digital strategy. He speaks regularly for the Institute of Direct Marketing and the DMA, and has consulted for clients including Skype, NPower, ITV, Oracle and more.

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