Adestra

Econsultancy and Adestra annual email marketing census has just been launched,  as always it will cover email marketing topics such as  Use of email services, Email marketing budgets,  ROI and effectiveness, Email Integration and Deliverability.

To take part all you will have to do is fill in the Email marketing Census 2010 survey, at the end of the survey you will also get the chance to fill in your details to get your own free copy (worth £150).

Adestra will hold a breakfast briefing in March where we will discuss the latest hot topics and best practice for email marketing for 2010, if you are interesting in taking part of that please feel  free to fill in your details on our contact us page.

Finally we would like to thank the Linus plus the team at Econsultancy and everyone else that has taken part in the 2010 Econsultancy and Adestra email marketing census, if you would like to stay up to date on these hot topics please subscribe to our RSS feed and/or newsletter to make sure that you receive the latest news.

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

Investments on deliverability should be driven by sensible, well thought-out commercial reasoning rather than by ‘scare’ stories in the industry press.

Following E-consultancy’s report that shows that the email platforms and services market is set to grow by 20% to an estimated value of £178 million by the end of this year, I’m convinced that one of the main drivers of this growth is deliverability – email marketers are investing in achieving better deliverability rates.

I’m torn between whether email marketers are spending on deliverability as a result of not wanting to be the star of the next ’scare’ story in industry press (such as have appeared on this very site!) or through sensible, thought-out commercial reasoning.

Interestingly, DMA research (The Email Service Provider Distribution Report) shows a real difference in the level of deliverability achieved by UK email service providers.

[This is only half the story too. There are also companies with in-house email systems - how are they faring? In my experience, many are not even measuring them to find out.]

The survey of Email Service Providers (ESPs) identified that they are achieving different rates of false positives of between 0.5% to over 5%.

The difference in these ‘blocked in error’ email rates shows how even those dedicated to email broadcasting are experiencing varying success rates. This is something all email marketers should consider when deciding on an ESP partner.

Why worry about deliverability?

Last week over lunch, I was chatting with one of our clients who operate in the online retail sector. This large brand was still mulling over whether deliverability investments were worthwhile and was struggling to concoct a way of proving the business case to colleagues.

We ended up doing some simple maths to work out ROI in order to come to a decision. These sums can be used by anyone and are shared below:

With a low deliverability rate

In this example, 100,000 people are mailed and 95% are delivered (the worst rate in the DMA research) meaning 95,000 are delivered.

Of them, say 5% click through (4,750 visits) and 10% convert on site. This leads to 475 orders

With a higher deliverability rate

Using the same numbers but just increasing the deliverability rate, 100,000 people are mailed again and 99.5% are delivered (best rate in DMA research) This means that 99,500 are delivered.

Of them, 5% click through again meaning 4,975 visits and 10% convert on site = 498 orders

The difference is 23 orders. Just using the average transaction value of a typical order, you can calculate the absolute return. If this increase in revenue is higher than the investment into better deliverability rates, then the decision is easy.

Looking at the flip side, should your deliverability rate worsen, then the potential to miss out on orders is a sobering thought. Email marketers experiencing erratic rates may want to consider this and work with their ESP to implement a monitoring policy or measures to take away the uncertainty.

[In addition to this, there are concerns about how emails are displayed and the impact on brand, but this is something for another blog entry.]

Anyone interested in finding out more about deliverability can do so in white paper can get a copy via the Adestra web site:

Henry Hyder-Smith is Managing Director of Adestra.