Adestra

Following my presentation at last week’s ECMOD event on email marketing, I noticed that most home shopping and e-tail email marketing strategies centre around offering discounts or promotions.

This is despite the fact that one of the major benefits of email marketing is that it is measurable. You can use this information to learn and further refine your communications.

After recently moving into our new house, I’ve been keeping my eye out for any bargains on home ware. This weekend, I found both the answer to over-reliance on promotional based marketing and extra storage in our bathroom.

It was delivered with Saturday’s copy of The Sun. Amongst the numerous pages dedicated to Sir Alex’s 20 years at Manchester United, was a small catalogue for Argos.

Serendipity led me to pick it up and flick through the pages. Before I knew it, I’d found something that would look good in the corner of our new bathroom.

Firing up my lap top, and going to www.argos.co.uk, I discovered that I could reserve the item and go and collect it from my local store, which I did.

On reaching the store, I used the self-service check out. My first human contact with any member of Argos’ staff was when they handed my goods to me.

Apart from this being a completely multi-channel experience, it shows quite how much information could have been gathered on me, as I interacted with technology at almost every point:

1. Product preferences: what other products did I browse on the website before buying, and what sort of complimentary products could I be offered?

2. Geography: where is convenient for me to shop, and what items are/are not in stock there?

3.  Intent: I reserved and showed up to collect and buy, proving that I am a ‘serious’ customer.

4.  Payment preferences: I used debit rather than credit.

If Argos was able to bring this information together it would have a lethal cocktail of information to power targeted and effective email marketing – including:

1. Niche newsletters: I’m buying homeware, so would other ‘mini brochure’ email newsletters on homeware be relevant?

2. Product cross-sell: I’ve both browsed and bought, so could my preferences on individual products be used to power ‘featured products’?

3. Local store: Can specific communications promoting ‘slow’ products in stock at my local store be pushed? Would ‘new catalogue available’ and opening hour pushed drive foot fall?

4. Converted: I have converted into a real customer – could I be pushed to recommend others? Or perhaps surveyed to understand my perceptions of using technology in this way to understand impact on brand value? If I had abandoned without buying, could I be encouraged to convert in the future?

Of course, in many organisations there would be many barriers:

Internal factors:

1. Available resources
2. Integrating data sets accurately and in a timely fashion
3. Internal politics
4. Not enough accurate measurement to prove/disprove the business case

External factors:

1. Is your ESP able to power such trigger based communications?
2. Are your customers happy to be contacted in such a way?

As yet, I have only received a confirmation email only, and to be honest I’m not surprised – my purchase was only 2 days ago. Add to this, that even as one of the more forward thinking catalogue shopping firms, I would fully expect them to will be facing almost all of the challenges above. Over the coming weeks, it will be interesting to see what email communications I receive.

As an email marketing agency with the technology to power many of these communications, I’ve seen a number of our clients achieve significant ROIs and generate the information to build a business case for sensible investments to overcome these challenges.

At the very least, it means that companies do not have to risk brand damage and sales hold back by having to rely on discount based promotions only. This flexibility in the communication plan can only be a good thing and opens the doors email marketing offers to high value companies that cannot use discounting.

Henry Hyder-Smith is Managing Director of UK ESP, Adestra and sits on a key hub of the DMA Email marketing council. More information at www.adestra.co.uk.

I’m in the process of moving house at the moment. In my infinite wisdom, after spending my life’s savings on the bricks and mortar, it is the turn of my own wallet to finance a range of home improvements.

To help in this arduous task, I’ve signed up for a number of relevant newsletters including B&Q, Screwfix Direct, Comet and more.

Strikingly, the majority of the email promotion focuses on discounts and offering deals…

What is it that makes the email channel for eRetailers synonymous with offers/discounts/deals?

I’m leading a seminar at ECMOD ( at_ecmod, 25/6th October @ Earls Court) which will focus on email marketing. Interestingly, as a result of my research and talking to the eRetailers in our client base, I’ve come to some conclusions about the use of email marketing in this vertical today.

Many eRetailers use a ‘spray and pray’ targeting technique to push out one size fits all marketing to their database. Despite the intelligence that can be gathered through email marketing including interest areas and behaviour on site/ within the email, the email promotion resembles more mini-brochures and less tailored communications using techniques such as dynamic content. None include any information about any local stores or capture this information on sign-up despite many asking for address.

Despite all the talk of multi-channel marketing and integrating stores, direct mail/catalogues and online marketing, email marketing is being used as a tactical promotional driver rather than a strategic offering. This could be due to how easy it is to measure sales through a web site from your email marketing, but it strikes me that there is very little integration across the channels. This very weekend, I’ve just bought a washing machine from Comet and provided my address and email address to arrange delivery. I’ll be interested to see if the content in the next newsletter changes because of this or any follow-up email communications are sent.

Every Friday, B&Q send their email newsletter just as the DIY-aholics are tuning their minds out of work and into what jobs lay ahead the following weekend. The newsletter states the offers that will be in store this weekend. This is an obvious call to action, but doesn’t include any method of measuring footfall.

Measuring footfall is essential to determining the impact of the email promotion. There are a couple of ways that they can do this:

* Comparisons: woefully at the whim of other retail factors (weather, competitor activity, World Cup etc), this method extrapolates trends
* Exclusive Offers: include in the newsletter an exclusive offer that is only available within the email newsletter. Thus, anyone asking for the offer in store can only have found out about it through the email
* Discount Codes/ Barcodes: Include a barcode image/ a unique code that needs to be quoted to claim some form of offer. Although manual in its administration afterwards, this method will allow you to see the number of people that redeemed the offer you pushed out by email
* Controls: Choose a control area. The email contacts in this area do not receive your email marketing and then you can compare the impact against regions that do receive the offer.

Until email marketers can measure in-store response accurately, then their email marketing will be forced into tactical promotions only.

On the flip side, talking to one of our clients, the offers that these companies use aren’t actually as good as they appear. He was experimenting with bundling complimentary products together for little or no discount. By ‘packaging’ his product portfolio like this, he was driving incremental sales from parts of his catalogue that were traditionally not good sellers.

Email marketing within the catalogue, home shopper and eRetail industry is in it’s infancy. It works and as a tactical channel it is being refined into a very effective medium. Without investments in measurement and integration, it will always stay that way and not reach its true potential.

Henry Hyder-Smith is Managing Director of Adestra.