Adestra

If yes, you’re among a growing trend of people who are logging on and downloading their email via a mobile phone. A study conducted by MarketingSherpa indicates 64% of key decision makers access their emails on a mobile platform. This trend is further supported by the fact that 36.4 million smart phones were sold in Q1 of 2009 worldwide (Gartner.com), principally indicating a large user base capable and willing to make use of mobile email access.

At present the majority of marketers are not fully optimising their emails for cross platform devices and as a result performance is hampered. With the increase of mobile usage, content creators will increasingly need to be aware of current and future device’s limitations, namely the lack of screen real estate and resolution.

The latest Smartphone’s are getting better at handling HTML, and showing images however there are a large proportion that are still unable to do so. The rendering of such emails may mean the difference between a client reading and interacting with the email or merely deleting the email, consequently losing any chance of an interaction.

To overcome the issues discussed above, there is a function within MessageFocus allowing you to create a mobile friendly version of your email. The main benefits of which; allow key messages to be delivered without unnecessary information leading to increased levels of performance.

If you require any further advice please contact your strategy consultant or email us moreinfo@adestra.com

Centaur Publishing recently demonstrated that Email and Direct Mail can effectively work together in a bid to boost paid subscriptions of its weekly magazine MarketingWeek.

From the outside the campaign incorporated a free subscription period reinforced with an integrated Direct Mail and Email strategy to push the benefits (A new profile section, A Marketer2Marketer section, An updated trends section, new columnists and more) of signing up to a paid subscription.

Without knowing the finer details the campaign seemed to contain the simple process of ‘Offer’ & ‘Reminder’ as a Direct Mail Piece and Email. This can be seen in the diagram below.

The offer and reminder emails were very simple, and clear, with the benefits of why someone should take up the offer being very apparent.

Inital offer and stage 2 email

Subscribers were given the option to subscribe for the free trial by email or fax, and were also encouraged to pass the offer on to interested colleagues in a bid for Centaur to further broaden the reach of the campaign.

Once a subscriber had enrolled they received their complimentary magazines for a set period. Then when it came to the last free magazine they were informed that this would be their last unless they continued with a ‘Paid’ subscription. Anyone that did not sign up to a paid subscription was then targeted with a dual approach by Email and Direct Mail. (more…)

The age of load and blast is officially over, and reporting on open rates and click throughs just aren’t enough. So, how can you use what is available to you to find out more about the people who have taken action on your email?

1. Who has converted? Whether a conversion for you is a purchase, subscribing to a free trial or downloading a PDF, analysing your conversions is important. With Adestra’s conversion tracking (see case study), not only can you see the “conversions”, you will also see who has abandoned the conversion process allowing you to follow up these warm prospects. If you are finding lots of people are abandoning the process, it may be time to refresh the process or the page that people are getting stuck at.
2. Where are they going after your email? Using your web analytics package, you can track and see where people have gone after your email. Compare the number of pages visited and the average order value of your email recipients versus other site visitors. Also see if email-driven visitors are steering clear of certain navigational paths popular with other visitors; perhaps you should then incorporate those pages into a future email. Using Adestra’s web analytics integration, you can do this quickly and easily.

To find out more about conversion tracking and web analytics integration and how we can help you to get more out of your email marketing, please email strategy@adestra.com

Reena Mistry, Group Account Director

We all know that we need to test and segment our email campaigns, but why? With the economy as is, it is even more important to start sending emails that are relevant to your customer base to increase your ROI (return on investment)

Testing has become a lot easier and quicker to do, and MessageFocus (Adestra’s Email Marketing Platform) can randomly split your lists automatically! All you need to decide is what you want measure and how you will measure success (Opens, Clicks, Conversions)?

Below is a small list of options that you can test;

• From Name
• Subject line
• Links
• Copy
• Personalised content versus non personalised content
• Discount versus free postage

Make sure you have a control cell and that you are only testing one element at a time, this way you will know exactly what you did to increase response. therefore launch your campaigns at the same time. You don’t want the time or day of the launch to influence results (unless that is what you are testing).
For more information on the what, where, when and how of testing, contact your strategy consultant, or if you are not a client of Adestra please email us on moreinfo@adestra.com

Jo Taylor, Trainer

It’s very apparent that there has been a year on year increase in the number of emails appearing in your Inbox. According to the DMA, there has been around a 25% increase of emails* sent since the same time last year. We all know that we can’t improve our results just by sending more email. The key is getting your email noticed and opened in everyone’s busy Inboxes.

So how can you get your email noticed? The three key factors in getting your email opened are:

• The Sender Name (or From Name)
  This is your calling card, telling the recipient who the email is coming from. Make sure it is recognisable and consistent. One client of ours always has their company name as the sender name, but adds to this when sending a particular offer or type of communication, e.g. newsletter and offers. If your sender name is a person, will the recipient recognise who that person is? Think about when you receive a marketing email from a person, do you want to open it?

• The Subject Line
  A vague subject line may increase the number of opens, but how many of those will click through to your website? Or, indeed, how many of those will mark you as SPAM? Use your subject line in conjunction with your sender name to give clear information about what is in the email.

• The Preview Pane
  Have a think about the layout of the top part of your email and how it will display in the recipient’s Preview Pane. If this is mainly images, with images turned off this will just look like a puzzle of missing images and alternative text. Put your key message and key “incentive to open” in the top left hand corner. People will then be able to see what to expect when they download the images and are more encouraged to do so.

Other factors that you should take into account are time of send, quality of the email and most importantly relevance and value.

If you have any questions or would like some examples of what has worked well, please email us at strategy@adestra.com

Reena Mistry, Group Account Director

*DMA National Email Benchmarking report Q2 2008

Trying to balance an email template that is beautifully designed and delivered into the recipient’s Inbox is difficult, but it can be done!

The idea is to keep the template as simple as possible, so keep these tips in mind when briefing your designer or creating your own template.

• Keep your template width to 600 pixels- this is the optimal size to view in a preview pane.

• Use a table structure to create your template.

• When using images add alternative and title text – Alternative text (for IE) and title text (for Firefox) – this will show when the images are not downloaded.

• Always add dimensions to an image- Therefore, images will not alter the width of the template, even if they are blocked.

• Do not use background images or background colours – Some email clients will strip this out, in the example below you will see the background image is a keyboard with white text on overlayed. If the image was blocked the white text would become invisable. Similarly, having a dark background colour with white text will result in it vanishing (in Gmail, for example).

• CSS maybe easier, but doesn’t always work- CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used when creating websites to specify fonts, link colours and other formatting.  Some email clients will strip this out, so make is easier on your designer and yourself, ask to add the formatting or style ‘inline’.

By using these simple pointers, your template will be easier to use within MessageFocus and if coded correctly it will render better in email clients.

Adestra can help you by designing optimised templates, they can also help you with a strategic template. Contact +44 (0)1865 242425 or sales@adestra.com for more information.

Joanne Taylor, Trainer

There is a huge buzz around social networking marketing and Yes, “Generation Y” are immersed in social media and instant messaging but before we write off email altogether in communications, we can’t ignore the unique benefits it brings to the recipient and the marketer.

The key difference between email and social media is the way email is delivered. The email is delivered directly to their inbox at a time that suits them. Plus it stays there for as long as the recipient requires allowing them to come back to it, pass on to colleagues as well as print for reference.

Plus, everyone who is using the web will understand and expect email, whereas social media requires the user to be more proactive to ‘join’ and ‘get involved’.

Email can also be very powerful in terms of relevancy and timing. An email can be personalised to the recipient as much or as little as your data allows. This does not just mean the salutation, but you can personalise who the email comes from, the subject line, and if you so wish the entire contents of the email making it relevant and instantly more effective.

This will mean people from John O’Groats will not receive event invites in Lands End. This combined with the highly advanced reporting and analytics email offers, it makes tracking success and identifying recipient preferences easy.

For example, the marketer may be sending their daily email at 14:00 because that suits them but what if the majority of recipients are reading the email after 18:00? Should you be sending your email later in the day and offering a plain text version to make it easier to read on a BlackBerry perhaps? Reporting that comes with email allows this kind of recipient insight, allowing you to tailor your communications to suit the recipient, and in turn improve your results.

It’s not to say that it’s an either/or situation. Email can compliment social media perfectly to drive advocacy. Emails’ ‘push’ technology does not rely on the person coming to you and is the perfect way to communicate out to your base.

The reasons why marketers have used email in the past have not changed and as yet, there is not other channel that offers the same reporting, targeting and visible ROI that email can. It may have been around for years, but that only means it’s a trusted and known communication tool and definitely not a fad.

It works, that’s all you need to know!

Reena Mistry, Client Strategy Consultant

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.

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

Co-registration could be the answer for you…

What exactly is Co-registration?

A textbook definition would be along the lines of : a negotiated arrangement in which companies collecting registration information from users (such as e-mail sign-up forms and shopping checkout process) include a separate box for users to check if they would also like to be added to a specific third-party mailing list.

So users opt in to receive marketing communications from multiple companies – usually complementary products – eg offering magazine subscriptions when you buy a product/sign up to a newsletter in the same industry sector.

The partnership is simple to set up and can be integrated into your current registration process. Setting up a co-registration partnership is easy – one site collects the new registrations for its partner by either adding a separate form to the registration process or an option to opt in. Data can then be double posted to yourself and your partner usually on a daily or weekly basis, whichever suits.

How does it work?

One way to boost your email database using co-registration is using someone else’s newsletter registration to acquire new members. For example, when a visitor to your partner’s website registers for their newsletter, they are offered the option to sign up for newsletters from your website. So because they’ve already expressed an interest in a newsletter, they are quite likely to sign up for an additional one so long as it’s relevant to them. A promotion or incentive is a great way to encourage people to sign up – when you consider the lifetime value of these potential customers, and the cost of acquiring new business elsewhere, this could be an ideal answer.

Make sure you enter into a co-registration deal with a company who targets a customer base with a similar profile to yours, but isn’t directly competitive (clearly your competitors would provide the ideal customer base, but that’s not really feasible!). Consider looking for complementary organisations and brands. One sector, for example, is event organising – where you share registration for similar events or offer magazine subscriptions relevant to that sector. As Adestra is a co-sponsor/co-registration partner of TFM 2009, when users register on the website they are encouraged to sign up to receive our latest industry email marketing whitepaper.

Typically, co-registration is open to all types of email marketers – and can equally work for both b2b and b2c sectors. The trick is identifying relevant partners and tracking responses. Remember, building relationships with key organisations now could forge strategic partnerships in future – make sure your competitors don’t beat you to the best data owners.

What’s in it for me?

Co-registration delivers confirmed subscribers who have positively opted-in to receive communications from you – they want to hear from your company! So make sure you have a planned approach to communicate relevant marketing messages.

List growth with co-registration is fast – ideal if you need to boost your database for a new launch or key sales period such as Christmas. When done correctly, co-registration can often generate thousands of new subscribers each day, so ensure systems are in place to deal with them.

Another key point is that the results need to be directly measurable – monitoring new sign-ups is one thing, accurately tracking the worth of the customers long term, and ROI, is quite another. Discuss with your Email Service Provider about how to go about this.

What are the drawbacks?

Co-registration can be an effective tool to increase your database in a short space of time, however there are a few limitations: because you are using third party data – be aware of what that means – Open rates, click-through and conversion rates tend to be much lower than qualified, segmented in-house lists.

Unsubscribes tend to be higher – it’s human nature for people to change their minds after a short time – therefore it’s critical for your new readers to make your early communications targeted, relevant… and interesting!  Ensure that you are able to fully track your core metrics – typically you can expect to be looking at high volume, low quality data, generating very little ROI.

Armed with that intelligence, you need to be asking some hard questions, chiefly “is it really worthwhile?”
This is part of your marketing strategy and represents your brand online, so make sure you are able to have enough space on the signup pages to include your logo and some compelling copy to attract your target audience. Again, relevancy is king.

What best practice methods should I follow?

At sign-up, it’s a legal requirement to use the standard confirmed double opt-in methods for data capture. Be up front about who you are and make it clear what new subscribers can expect. Just saying we won’t spam you doesn’t wash.

When contacting co-registration lists make sure you carry out your own segmentation of data and make your messages relevant (this will significantly help to keep your open rates and click-throughs up and unsubscribes down). Let them know why they are receiving the email (this is especially important if they have signed up from the partner’s site and not your own) and include the usual unsubscribe message at the end.

Trigger a welcome message after opt-in has been confirmed – this way they see you while they still remember what is it that they have signed up for. Don’t leave it a week, otherwise it’s too late.

What does it cost?

This is usually on a pay-per-registration basis, in other words a set price for each new email address that subscribes. You need to work out how much a new subscriber is worth to your business and how much you can afford to spend, you could even look at paying on performance.

Better still, don’t pay for it. It appears an outstanding idea if it costs you nothing – ie a data swap – what have you got to lose? Here you would swap a set number of contacts with the cooperating organisation – aim to carry out an initial test where you track to the value of the data over a set period, say 3 months. If you’ve not done it before, this practice might make a good introduction to co-registration as you’re more likely to get management buy-in if you use the f word (free that is!).

Return on Investment

Tracking the performance, i.e. ROI, of your new list is absolutely critical to see if co-registration is a successful tool for your organisation (or if you have identified the correct data partner). Large volume is not the most important factor here, identifying the lifetime value of that customer is.

If 80% of the co-registered names unsubscribe within the first four months, then the list has a very low value. However, if your co-registered customers convert more than those who signed up using other methods, then you have a nice profitable partnership.

How do I find a partner?

The easiest way to find co-registration partnerships is by using list brokers. They can help you identify the right customer base profiles and begin a new business relationship.

Other data generators

Don’t forget, other ways to boost your database quickly, and can be used in tandem with co-registration for website and email campaigns, are viral marketing and encouraging ‘forward to a friend/colleague’ techniques. An example, such as Thresher’s 40% off in-store promotion that went ballistic after staff forwarded it around the world, shows the power of this technique. Note if it’s a good enough deal, most people will forward it anyway. Also using viral games as promotions have proved successful for brands such as IWOOT.com and ba.com.

Summary

Overall, co-registration could be a fast lead generation activity for your business. It’s a good way to collect lots of names, but beware the quality – it’s critical to track the value of the dataset over time, otherwise your carefully planned marketing communications strategy will fall at the first hurdle. A smaller, better quality database could produce significantly improved results.

Given the state of the economy at the moment, managing to engineer a free data-swap is a great way to embark on your co-registration journey.

Hollie Williams, Client Strategy Consultant